Legal Commentary

I've been hanging out for the past five years over at Mirror of Justice, where emotions run high in rollicking discussions of all things Catholic, legal, and theoretical, and for a much shorter period of time at Legal Ethics Forum, where emotions run significantly lower in discussions of all things Model Rulesish.  It's nice to hang my shingle out here for a while where, as I understand it, the field of inquiry is wide open.

Ideally, I should have had the foresight to prepare a whole pipeline of witty, insightful posts for my time here.  I haven't.  I've been preoccupied by my venture last week into the world of Facebook.  As a friend of mine remarked, FB simultaneously elevates and trivializes our relationships.  Gone forever are the days when we could sing along wistfully with our beloved Wilburys, "Maybe someday down the road aways, you'll think of me and wonder where I am these days."  Odds are, they know where you are these days, and they know what you had for breakfast.  Curiosity is satisfied, but the mystery of it all is bludgeoned to death in the process.  FB angst is old news to most of you, and I'm sure that there is an entire section of the MLA convention devoted to navel-gazing scholarship on the FB experience.  But bear with me, for I do have a PrawsBlawgable question about all this after the jump. 

What does FB mean for the professor-student relationship?  I'm not talking about whether the law school should use FB as a professional networking venture; I'm talking about what students know about you and what you know about your students.  I still base my image of the law school professor on Phil Areeda, who I'm certain would have had me arrested if I had dropped by his office to chat about the weekend.  Even when I started teaching at St. John's, a senior colleague (whose attitude did not, I learned, reflect the prevailing sentiment of the faculty) warned me that, given my age, students would try to become friends with me, and that I should run screaming if any approached me outside class. 

And now what have I become?  Going out with students for a beer, fielding a flag football team, and playing basketball with students has always made me an enthusiast for the friendship that dare not speak its name, but now I've taken it to another level -- I'm FB friends with my students.  I'm all up in their business, and they're in mine.  Is it wrong?  Is it a concern?  Do any other faculty FBers deny student friend requests?  Do you keep them on a separate friend list with more limited access to your page?  At least for me, the notion of keeping a mysterious distance between students and myself was a non-starter, but have I (or my students) lost something in the process?  WWPAD?  (What would Phil Areeda do?)