Law School Dress Codes?

Eric Chafee, guest blogging at The Faculty Lounge, talk about dress codes in law firms and wonders whether the economic forces that are moving attire in law firms away from business casual might impact law school faculty as well. Prof. Chafee says he hopes so.

And I'm just as surprised as anyone else to find that I hope so, too. Look, I'm an Xer. I'll get away with what I can get away with. I only need to see one Boomer colleague head off to class without a jacket on, and I'm in. That's all the permission I need for "business casual." But it is a professional school, for heaven's sake. Law professors talk a lot about how students don't behave like professionals, but I wonder whether we adequately set the tone. If our students had a firm sense of what was and was not professional, then I think we could exercise a little more latitude in some of the superficial parts of being a professional, like whether we wear a jacket to class or not. But failing that, I do think that maybe we ought to be presenting the whole package.

On the other hand, I do notice that it's a guy who is issuing the call for traditionally professional attire. And he cites his friend, another guy. I have a friend who has written about dress code, too. Prof. Kathleen Bergin, permablogger over at Faculty Lounge, wrote a piece for the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism: Sexualized Advocacy: The Ascendant Backlash Against Female Lawyers, or as I like to call it, "Just Wear the Damn Pants." Anytime conversation turns to what is and is not professional, I can't help but notice that the standard seems to be very white and very male.

For me, for the foreseeable future, my clothing choices are ultimately not driven by my sense of professionalism or my politics. They're driven by the fact that I'm in a two-profession family with two small daughters and no family in a 2500-mile radius. I wear what's clean.

Well, what's mostly clean.

Why Law Profs & Students Should Care About Twitter

So I've now been using Twitter in earnest for about 5 days now. I'm obsessed. I knew it would be hard to investigate the phenomenon that is Twitter, learn enough about it to understand what it can be used for, and stop the investigation before I got sucked in. And I was right. I overshot "discovery" and sailed straight into "obsession" within about 24 hours.

So I just saw that avid Twitterer Jim Milles has "re-tweeted" a link to a piece about Twitter in Court.

Here's what Jim's tweet (a message on Twitter) looks like: jmilles RT @mrebmann: Twittering and Transparency in the Courtroom http://tinyurl.com/bgewho via @ShareThis

And here's what it means. Jim Milles found information of interest that was in a tweet by Twitter user mrebmann. Jim forwarded this information in his own tweet. The information is on a web site with a predictably-long URL, so it's been shortened using a service called Tiny URL. That short URL (or "tiny URL") goes to the same place as the predictably long URL. And then at the end, it says "via @ShareThis." I have no idea what that means yet. Cut me a little slack. I'm just five days on this new planet.

Why should you care? Why should your students care?

Because the information Jim's tweet refers to is a piece about judges allowing reporters to report on cases from inside the courtroom using Twitter. Twitter, of course, only allows messages of 140 words or less, which is why all of this shorthand has been created. If allowing reports via Twitter becomes routine, look for Twitter shorthand that is law-specific to develop soon. And if you don't know how Twitter works or what those abbreviations mean, you won't be able to keep up with it in real time and decipher whether it's accurate or whether it complies with limit of the court's permission to report via Twitter.

Of course, you could just ignore the whole thing and just hire a 12-year-old to go with you to work every day.

The Twitter Experiment

Millennial Law Prof can be followed on Twitter for the next 30 days as millennialprof. I'll send out quick tips and info for teaching Millennial students. Let's see how this goes!

Twitter and Facebook and MMS and SMS and my Kindle

I love my Kindle. I don't ever like to pass up an opportunity to point that out. It actually is an improvement on the technology of "the book" . . . to a certain extent. Mostly, it alleviates the anxiety I have all of the time that I'm going to be stuck someplace with nothing to read. I like the way that makes my inability to cope with boredom sound bookish, as if I constantly thirst for knowledge and insight. Kindle doesn't confuse me. It's supposed to be an e-book. And it is.

My phone on the other hand has taken me about 7 years to get used to. It's a Treo 650p. I've had a slavish devotion to having a Palm-based phone because I thought we had Palm stock. My husband told me nonchalantly a couple of months ago that we haven't had that stock for years. My phone has duped me into using it. I begin to eye my phone suspiciously.

Here's the learning curve on my Treo 650p:

2003: Husband bought me Treo 600p. I quickly learned to use it as both a phone and personal organizer. I could dial from my contacts list like a pro. I had no idea how to do anything else with it. Although I did run up a $1,000 bill in the first month because I didn't realize you had to turn the Internet back off after turning it on.

2005: Traded in my Treo 600p for a 650p using my school's technology budget allocation. Because I have no idea how to game these things, I failed to take advantage of getting a new cell phone contract AND some deal where you manage to roll two years of your technology budget together for a single purchase. I set the record for paying the most money ever for a cell phone. Continued to use as a cell phone and personal organizer.

2006: Learned to take a picture and assign it to a person's contact info. Learned to assign personal rings to people. Crashed phone assigning personal rings to people. Quit assigning personal rings to people.

2007: Discovered that "vibrate" is almost as loud as a ring tone. Learned to just turn phone off. Forgot to turn phone back on. Received no messages or calls for approximately a year. Learned to sync calendar wirelessly with laptop. Had already quit using Palm calendar by that time, though, and had no idea how to sync with Google Calendar, which I had begun using.

2008: Learned to take a picture and assign it as the wallpaper for my phone. Learned to check my e-mail from the web thing. Still couldn't configure my phone to get e-mail by pushing the "check e-mail" button. Whatever. Appointed to administration, where I was required to use Outlook. Finally figured out how to sync Palm calendar with Google Calendar. No idea how to factor Outlook into this equation. Contacts are still in Palm. E-mail and Calendar are in Google. Other calendar and additional e-mail is in Outlook. My task list is Remember the Milk. I use a service called JOTT to help coordinate this disaster. IT guy suggests a phone I'm not interested in and tells me to quit using Google. I don't think that's very IT-guy-like of him, so I ignore this advice. I learn how to Facebook and become obsessed. I learn to Twitter but can't figure out the point.

2009: Figure out how AND WHY to text message. I send pictures via text message. I learn to take video on my phone, but my phone is not sophisticated enough to attach the videos to a text message. I learn to update my Facebook status via Twitter. I learn to update my Facebook status via text message. People begin to follow me on Twitter despite my complete Twitter stagnation for 6 months. I take this as a sign that I should start Twittering again. I still can't figure out the point. I have finally figured out how to use every feature on my Treo 650p and conclude that I must have an iPhone.

The iPhone has a Kindle app. But the Kindle has no iPhone app. I begin to eye my Kindle suspiciously.