Legal Commentary

We had an interesting series of posts recently about whether to call students by their first or last names.  (See, for instance, here and here.)  An active commenter on the second post was Profesor Liz Glazer, who argued in favor of a policy of calling students by their first names.  She has now posted a draft paper on SSRN called Name Calling, which expands on her thoughts on the issue.  She writes that the motivation behind her policy "is an aspiration toward gender neutrality in the law school classroom," and adds that it may be especially useful to the extent that it provides a safer approach to students who are either transgendered or who might be mistaken for someone of a different gender.  

Liz's paper is short and interesting and well worth reading.  I take her point about both transgendered students and students whose appearance might mislead.  Nevertheless, for the reasons I discussed in my earlier post, I continue to respectfully disagree with her.  Whether to call students by their first or last names is not a life-or-death issue for me and I don't object to her policy as such.  But, as I wrote earlier, I am not sure that her focus -- particularly the two types of special cases she discusses -- is necessarily as important as a focus on, say, race or, particularly class, both of which might argue for the use of last names.  (On the latter point, recall that Liz calls students by their first names but expects to be addressed by the honorific "Professor Glazer" -- an approach that makes perfect sense from a gender-oriented view but is perhaps more problematic from a class-oriented view.) 

In that sense, I note that she refers to her piece as taking up Kenji Yoshino's call, in the book Covering, to "rais[e] consciousness about the cultural harms inflicted by a prevailing norm that has until now gone unquestioned."  In my review of Covering in the Michigan Law Review (which still contains possibly the only detailed discussion of Charlie Sheen to appear in the legal literature), I wrote that Yoshino's book fails "to engage seriously another aspect of our identities that is just as fundamental to what we might call our 'true' selves, and just as connected to questions of social justice and injustice, as any of the categories that are limned so well in his book: class."  I added: "It may be awkward for us, as legal academics, to confront the relevance of our own privileged positions to the work we do and the world we see in front of us.  Still, . . . we should have that conversation."

These lines aren't aimed particularly at Liz or her article.  I think a class-based argument could be made for either a first-name or last-name approach to students in the classroom, although either approach would have to account for how willing or eager we are to call ourselves by our first names or by some honorific, like Professor, that sets us apart from the class.  But I continue to be struck by how much law and legal scholarship has to say about other aspects of identity, down to transgender, and how little it has to say about something as pervasive and universal -- and uncomfortable, for law professors both enjoy and ignore their elite class status -- as class.  This is an old American story, of course.  But certainly very little about the (largely class-privileged) social revolutions of the 60s, or the subsequent rise of (largely class-privileged) identity politics and scholarship, has made so much as a dent in our tendency to treat class as invisible when, like Calgon, we're soaking in it.

Hat tip for the title: Ray J. Johnson.