Legal Commentary

Walk out into the hallway and look back at your office door and bulletin board.

What does it say about you?  What is your message?  Who is your audience?

Is there an institutional norm at your school to favor or to disfavor professorial marking behavior? Are there some things that you (or others) might consider inappropriate outside your office or outside the offices of your colleagues?

I took a decidedly unscientific survey of the faculty offices at my law school.  You can see the results after the break . . . .

What is your own style? Do you pay attention to your door and bulletin board or do you just keep pinning more stuff on top of the stuff that was already there?  Do you pay any attention to the displays of your colleagues?  Is it time for you to take down some stuff or to come up with some new stuff?  Have course web sites overtaken this function?  Do you stress over having enough "flair," like Jennifer Aniston's boss in the movie "Office Space"?

In the faculty hallways at the FIU COL, there was an almost even split between the minimalists -- 12 profs had no decorations or just their contact information and office hours -- and the exterior decorators -- 14 profs posted and displayed items. 

• Office hours & contact information
• 20 stick pins (that's all, just the pins)
• Many cartoons
• A few funny cartoons
• Children's refrigerator art
• Magnets (miscellaneous organizational logos, animal shapes, and creatures)
• Newspaper clippings to non-current events
• Yellowed internet print outs about the legal profession (e.g., wages & hours stuff)
• Photos of the prof's kid, spouse, and cat
• Posters for upcoming interesting conferences
• Posters for other conferences
• Posters for long past conferences (at which the prof spoke)
• Posters for graduate law programs at other universities
• Posters for obscure scholarships and quirky writing competitions
• Posters for study abroad programs sponsored by other universities
• Posters for this university's programs and events
• Quotes from Cicero, Thoreau, et alia
• University stickers from the prof's undergrad university or law school  

In the interest of full and fair disclosure, I am a strict minimalist -- a picture of my office door appears below. I want my office to look more professional than professorial, i.e., to resemble a law firm, although curiously I never practiced law with a firm and I am a professor. My door is at one end of the standard distribution.  At the other end is a door down the hall that is decorated in what might be called the Cracker Barrel school of interior design.

De gustibus non est disputandum!