After my post on the NYT column on lawyers’ dress, there was an interesting discussion of the “minefield” it presents. Since that time, there’s also been an interesting discussion of the value of empathy on the site, which got me to thinking about the point I was trying to make in the clothes comments (which is narrower than my original post) but not making that well. I think it has some broader significance and so I'm posting on it one more time.
To start my point, here’s 3 quotes from the original NYT article on clothes:
“she said one lawyer had shown up for a jury trial in a velour outfit that looked for all the world as if she was “on her way home from the gym.””
“he had seen participants wearing “skirts so short that there’s no way they can sit down, and blouses so short there’s no way the judges wouldn’t look.””
“titillating attire was “a huge problem” and a distraction in the courtroom and that “you don’t dress in court as if it’s Saturday night and you’re going out to a party.” In the spirit of sexual equity, Judge Goldgar added that he was also unhappy with lawyers who sported loud ties, some with designs like smiley faces.”
When you read these quotes I think there are two points inherent in each speaker’s comments. First, the lawyer in question appears to have clearly and significantly violated (to borrow Patrick’s terminology) social sartorial norms. Second, the lawyer in question is deserving of some sanction or consequence for that choice, at the very least the subtle, or not so subtle, social condemnation of peers. The former appears from the examples, which are set up to make the violations appear obvious – who, after all, would think it a good idea to work out and then go to court, or look like she had? The second appears from the comments themselves – they are that form of subtle or not so subtle social pressure at work.
In a convocation address in 2005 at Kenyon College, which has recently been in the news because being published in a book, David Foster Wallace talked about a particular sort of empathy, although describing it as a matter of living a thoughtful life. And in doing so he talks about how hard empathy – which he describes largely as a matter of being able to overcome the innate human tendency to be the star of our own stories – is to do.
He describes how in the mundanity and challenges of adult existence it is far easier to judge the rudeness, ugliness, or facile stupidity, of the check out woman at the grocery store, than it is to say “what it would be like to be her, what are her burdens, what kind of day has she had?”
And I think the intensity of my reaction to some of the posts comes from seeing the women in these quotes as the check-out woman from Foster Wallace’s address. Who is gym clothes wearing lawyer? Is she the woman with intense body image issues, who only wears baggy and frumpy clothes because that way no one can see her body? Are her kids at home sick from school, and she’s dashed into court to try and help her client leaving her 11 year old “in charge” but not able to engage with her clothes properly? Or is she just clueless, unable to pick up the social clues which, as Patrick argued with some justification, and despite my many counter-factuals, isn’t that hard for most people? / Etc. Etc. And my plea is really to say, before we simply judge those who violate professional norms in this way, we should try to occupy their position, and not simply assume that the violators are cocking a snook at society.
I don’t know if this is a definition of empathy or merely a description of what it might look like. But I do know that it is central to the type of thinking process that I want a judge to be able to go through with respect to those who appear before him or her.
Without it, the problem I perceive is that the already marginalized – because for good or ill, being sartorial norm breakers puts these bad dressers on the social margins – are at the risk of being marginalized even more because of the inability of those around them to occupy their point of view. I don’t want that for bad dressers or anyone else.