Friday Fun For Fashionisti

Vol. 32, issue 3 of the Oklahoma City University Law Review landed on my desk today and it includes this article:  Erik M. Jensen, “Law School Attire: A Call for a Uniform Uniform Code.”  If the UUC is adopted here, I’ll be in trouble, as I’m not sure I even remember how to tie a tie.  Anyway, here is the code:

§ 1-101. Short Title

This statute shall be known and may be cited as the Uniform Uniform Code.

§ 2-101. Longer Stuff.

Faculty members at accredited law schools shall, when on law school grounds or on law school business, dress in a way that would not embarass their mothers, unless their mothers are under age fifty are are therefore likely to be immune to the possibility of embarrassment from scruffy dressing, in which case the faculty members shall dress in a way that would not embarrass my mother.

As for the article which presents the UUC:

Part I discusses why professors insist on dressing like children, and Parts II and III present the case for adult dress.  The heart of the article is Part IV, which provides a draft UUC [above].  Although the draft doesn’t explicitly mandate neckties, Part V defends the tie as an essential part of male professional attire.  Part VI, an anticipatory response to critics, discusses some conceptual difficulties in implementing and enforcing the UUC.  Finally, Part VII considers whether the UUC is simply part of a vast, right-wing conspiracy. (The answer is no.).

California Court of Appeal opinion publication up, slightly

A story in today’s San Francisco Recorder, “Appeal Courts Publishing More, Barely,” by Mike McKee, gauges the effects of a new court rule designed to encourage opinion publication by the California Court of Appeal and includes these statistics:

. . . Of 11,581 opinions filed by the state’s appellate districts between April 1, 2007, and March 31, 2008, only 1,151– 9.9 percent of the total – were ordered published, according to figures given to The Recorder by California’s reporter of decisions, who oversees the editing and publication of Supreme Court and appellate opinions in the state’s official reports.

By comparison, a year earlier, between April 1, 2006, and March 31, 2007, when the old rules were in play, only 999 – or 9 percent – of 11,067 rulings were published, according to the court’s records.
. . .

The biggest increase occurred in San Francisco’s First District Court of Appeal, which, according to The Recorder’s count, went from 127 published opinions in 2006-07 to 162 a year later, for an increase of 27.5 percent.