Breaking the Rules: Etiquette’s Place in Law School

-- By CarolineElkin - 18 May 2009

The Indoctrination

When I was young, certainly no more than 10 years old, my grandmother gave me a book: Tiffany’s Table Manners for Teenagers. My parents had already taught me the proper way to hold a fork, that the napkin goes on the lap, etc. I thought it was a joke – but Grandma wasn’t joking. I was to memorize it from cover to cover. There are rules, and it’s important not to offend anyone by violating them.

But etiquette is broader than table manners. In The Behavior of Law, Black defines it as a means of maintaining social control, and asserts that any deviant behavior only reinforces the strength of the rules. There are many spoken and unspoken rules governing a classroom environment, imposed by both students and teachers, and the encouraged classroom behavior hasn’t changed much since kindergarten. Raise your hand if you wish to speak. Don’t talk to your neighbors. Pay attention to the teacher. Law school follows these rules and imposes new ones as well. Do your reading and brief your cases every night to be adequately prepared for class. Outline for finals. The person next to you is no longer Jane – she is Ms. Doe. While these are just a few examples, the formalism is everywhere. But why does it matter if we obey all the rules or not?

Breaking the Rules, Then

Certainly rules like “no talking” and “raise your hand to speak” allow the teacher to maintain some control over the class. In theory if the rules are followed the teacher can clearly communicate material to the class, and the the level of education will rise. Hence it is important to the other students that everyone obeys the rules, so everyone can learn.

I’ve heard my friends who are now teachers talk about their “bad” kids. These are the kids who talk to their neighbors in class. They interrupt when the teacher is teaching. They’re sent to the principal’s office for their “bad” behavior. But is this “bad” behavior, and does it make the kids “bad”? Probably not – some just don’t buy into the rules, some might be acting out for attention, and some don’t care either way. Perhaps you can trace their behavior to their parents, perhaps not. The issue is bigger than one or two teachers making a judgment call, though – it’s that kids may be deemed “bad” by the fact that they break rules of social control. Why does the fact that they break the teacher-imposed classroom rules of etiquette make them worthy of being called “bad”?

Likely it depends on what rules they break, and if they’re able to make sound decisions for themselves about the purposes the rules serve before they break them. Talking out of turn in class might interrupt the teacher’s line of thought, impacting the quality of education for other students. But it’s hard to know why I made sure to keep my uniform shirt tucked in during high school. The micro-level reason is that the punishment was a demerit slip and two hours of detention. But on a macro-level, I regret that I never questioned the policy, because really, how could that possibly impact the level of my education? Insofar as my teachers didn’t label me “bad” for (negligently or not) breaking a rule? Maybe it would have affected the quality of my recommendations for college, but if so, that would be a shame.

Breaking the Rules, Now

Fast-forward to law school, where you still raise your hand if you want to speak in class (unless it’s to socialize via G-chat – on silent volume, obviously – rather than writing a note as was the accepted practice ten years ago). However, there’s a student in my section who makes comments and jokes during class without raising his hand. While it hasn’t seemed to bother the professors, many students in the class (myself included) have found it irksome. He’s not a gunner, but by speaking out of turn he plays a different role that aggravates students. But I at least shouldn’t care: evaluating it I can only find harm in that he’s breaking a social norm.

The people who break the mold have always fascinated me, because that’s never been me. We all outline for finals now. But what if we didn’t? I know one student who didn’t outline all year. People felt the need both to discuss his habits and to judge him for them. But as far as I know we all outline because we’ve been told that’s what we’re supposed to do, and as far as I know that outlier is not in any danger of failing out of CLS (though he may be – the student-imposed rule of secrecy regarding performance prohibits any conversation of whether our adopted habits were useful preparation or not). Admittedly, I too outlined this semester without considering alternative preparation methods.

Using the Rules

Nonetheless, my aversion from breaking rules, instinctual within me since at least my Tiffany’s Table Manners days, has been weakening. After nearly a year of studying rule ambiguities, and a semester of thinking about legal ideas creatively, I find my thoughts focus on the purposes laws serve. Why do we need the formalism of bright line rules of etiquette? We’ve challenged the formal classroom style in Eben’s class in listening to music, being on a first name basis with each other and Eben, using wiki threads to continue class discussions, abandoning the blind grading policy, etc. But note that many of the ways we broke the rules with Eben were conscious decisions on his or both our parts to run class differently. So then we naturally created new rules when breaking old ones. Still I think there was great benefit to this approach, because we valued the function of rules instead of blindly following them. The rules we created from a default starting point became useful, as thoughtfully-adopted choices of behavior facilitating a common goal.