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A legal education is a factory of privilege. In the same way an English commoner could turn

unwieldy gains into a baronetcy or lordship in the 18th Century, Americans today can choose to give

large sums of money to a school in exchange for a title. Imperialism of any sort requires a cocky

bureaucracy. Hopefully a job as well, but the past few years have given promise to an excuse to hold

one's head high, not an expansive house full of down pillows on which to rest it. The legal education

system exists not just to train us but to transform us, to form a corporate bureaucracy of middle-aged

white men, in thought if not in features. As the son of a lawyer who has met many a leery and leering

firm partner, I thought I would be prepared. I was not.

Intersession is home to the most overt of the indoctrination. Not home of classes per se, but

rather home to auditorium talks on topics such as Professionalism in the Law and Ethics in Daily

Life. Prim and overeager guides explain to the moon-faced masses on how to pass. One must drink.

One must talk sports or shopping, depending on target's gender. I recall my relief at avoiding and shame

in recognizing a woman's tightrope between slut-shaming and enforced enthusiastic attractiveness. The

rules of the game are long and arcane, but I'd have been much better at remembering them if I knew my

identity within the system. I'll admit that unfortunately, I knew no such thing.

I realized not long after the category was reified in the fall of 2001 that I fell into the raggedly-

determined class of Swarthy-American. With olive skin and a nose like a scimitar (even our

hypocatastases get shipped out to the Far East), a stranger would seem to need to engage in conversation

to get to know me. The polite Tennessean wanted to make sure that didn't have to happen.Keep your hair short, and make sure you never have a beard. Okay, this is easy enough. Do

you drink? Well, from time to time... Then great! Keep a beer in your hand. Wouldn't want people to

jump to conclusions! Wait, who wouldn't? Whatpeople? Which conclusions? The kicker, however, was

the clincher. Never do anything in front of a client you wouldn't do at an airport. Ah, so I figured it

out. I must assuage their guilt of association while letting them brag about meeting an Exotic.

Was this a bad time to mention that I avoid ties, as they are symbols of Western Masculine

Imperialism? Of course it was, but at least I got to leave the conversation with my head up high,

observing the letter of the first law while violating all of its assumed prescriptions. I was late to the

realization, much to my eventual depression, that I wasn't being interviewed for what made me unique. I

was being taxonomized, with the passive tense construction very much emphasized. The interviewing

process was not to learn about my taste in music or self-styled skill in the kitchen, it was done to pin me

on the wall asJuris swarthica, to prove my worth on the right collector's tableau and to emphasize my

harmlessness in the tap room as opposed to my prowess in the courtroom.

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to choose between resignation to the Empire or a prison of debt. A beard and open collar is the garb of

only the most honorable of fools.