The Fool's Gold-en Rule

As most of you know, I am in my third and final year of law school. It has, for the most part, been a rich and stimulating experience with (mostly) smart and respectable people. Sometimes things happen, though, that make me embarassed to be part of this profession and afraid for the future of law and lawyerdom.

In several of my classes throughout these three years, professors have taken time to instruct us how to not be assholes when we become attorneys. Examples include:

• "If someone shows up 5 minutes late to a deposition, you don't need to report it to the judge, reschedule, and charge your opponent for costs. We've all been 5 minutes late."
• "When negotiating with prosecutors, don't accuse them of personally detesting the Constitution. They are just doing their jobs and most of them are perfectly lovely people. "
• In drafting interrogatories, don't use unnecessarily obtuse language or complex sentence structure. Think of interrogatories YOU have to answer and how you would like them to be worded. "

To me, these all seems to be variations of "treat others the way you would like to be treated" a/k/a The Golden Rule. Didn't we learn this in pre-school? Or at HOME as toddlers? Sure, a friendly reminder will do now and again, but I find it sad that law professors know they need to devote substantial time to reminding professional students and soon-to-be officers of the courts of this country to treat each other with basic human decency and respect.

I realize that this post may invite a plethora of lawyer jokes, but remember who our administrator is. The lawerly-inclined on this forum would never make jokes about your chosen profession. We learned the Golden Rule at about the same time we learned to brush our teeth, despite what my law school professors would have you think.