Things have been busy as the end of the semester approaches, so blogging has been light to nonexistent. But a couple of curious things happened this week, and I want to report. Details below the fold.

First, our faculty seems to have begun to take seriously the fact that a large proportion of our students blog (and/or LiveJournal, and/or MySpace, and/or facebook, and yes, I’m using all of those as verbs), and not infrequently do so about their teachers and their classes. There have been discussions in the legal blogosphere about the professionalism issues here. I’m intrigued today by the boundary issues. One of our librarians wandered by one of the more frequently updated student blogs and sent me a link to a post that described the law school-based social ritual of a couple of my colleagues, who happen to be good friends. The post was friendly and positive and used pseudonyms, which it turned into nicknames. I forwarded the link to the colleagues, who (so far as I can tell) were intrigued and not offended, and one of them casually mentioned to the poster that the faculty member had read the post. The student was a bit surprised, I think; students generally expect that their blogging is their “space,” and faculty (and others) shouldn’t intrude. For the most part, faculty are happily ignorant of student blogs, but inevitably there is overlap. Students, of course, sometimes read faculty blogs, and I know that some of my students read this one. For better and sometimes for worse, this is going to happen more and more often. We surf, we follow links, and all of a sudden there it is. Who my student hooked up with last week or, more likely, the terrible, terrible, no-good, very bad thing that fed the rumor mill in the student lounge recently.

Second is a line-crossing example of another sort. In my classes, I try to keep three balls in the air more or less at once: the doctrinal ball, the theory and policy ball, and the lived experience ball. That third ball occasionally consists of war stories (what I did as a lawyer), and occasionally it consists of my own life (my kids, my house, my town). The other day, because it was relevant to a “practical implications of a trademark law doctrine” point (is a domain name a form of property? can it be seized to satisfy a judgment?), I illustrated the importance of “property available to satisfy a judgment” by sketching a small commercial lawsuit in which my wife and I are plaintiffs. We have a judgment, which is a nice thing to have, and we are working through the pragmatics of collection, which is a complete pain. This is something that law students are rarely exposed to. Partly, collection has a lot to do with tactics, which substantive courses in law school rarely bother with, and partly, once due process considerations are dispensed with, and once you’re safely beyond civil procedure, secured transactions, and bankruptcy, collection has relatively little to do with doctrine. So I told them a bit of the history of the case (how we won), and a bit of what I hope is coming (we crush the opposition).

They were (and are) fascinated. Much more fascinated, in fact, than any group of students ever has been by any war story that I’ve shared in the past. Partly, I think, the fascination stems from the sense that I have a bloodthirsty side. Mild-mannered me. It turns out that as a plaintiff, I have a finely honed sense of outrage and a strong, not to say healthy, interest in vengeance. Partly, I hope, the fascination stems from the sense that I’ve briefly opened up the hood on the well-oiled automobile of justice, and it turns out that lawyers and courts are motivated by all the same rational and irrational biases that motivate everyone else. (My sketch, for example, includes a brilliant piece of lawyering in which a lawyer wins the trust of a judge by listening to the judge’s problem, which involves auto repair, and then solving that problem.) We’re not just training lawyers (and students don’t need to feel that they’re being made “otherworldly”). We training people. I like to imagine that this makes actually practicing law a little less alien. I don’t know that sharing this anecdote was the right thing to do, but for a short time there was a closeness in the class that is pretty uncommon, even in lively classrooms. Your professor is a person. There it is again.

Both teachers and students worry a lot about the “right” social distance between them. A lot of the time we do our worrying in the privacy of our own thoughts. Sometimes one group or the other makes a conscious decision to close or expand that gap. Or (in most cases, probably “and”), the width of that gap happens to change. We wake up having to sort through the consequences. That’s what is happening here. Food for thought over the summer, anyway. We’ll see what’s changed by next August.

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