Con Law

Here's three 2L's hard at work during today's lecture on assorted fundamental rights. From left to right: Aaron Calkins, Arch Harner, and Randy Todd. Lecturing in the front of the class is Prof. O'Callaghan. Jason Naess appears right above Aaron's left shoulder. The rest are too un-finished to warrant mentioning.

Mr. Ben Onosko

Prof. O'Callaghan's syllabus recommends doodling as an alternative to surfing the net during class. An excellent policy. As you might deduce, Ben sits to my left in that class.

Not Mr. Chief Justice Roberts

He came. Unfortunately, none of my sketches of the Chief Justice turned out good. However, it wasn't a complete artistic flop, I drew this guy. I don't know this student, but people have recognized the drawing as "Stacey." Hope you don't mind, Stacey, you're famous now.

Professor Mark Anderson

Was kind enough to save his hand-drawn diagrams from fall semester 08. There were a lot. I scanned them in and they appear as the background here.

Professor Jack Miller

Business Entities tax is quite the beast. Prof. Miller is more cheerful than I am, at least at 8:00 am. "It's not bad enough to warrant sarcasm," he says. So when he says, "This is it, this is the heart of darkness." You know for sure that the code is big fat and wrinkly.

Dean Don Burnett

The Dean teaches PR. PR stands for legal ethics. My favorite quote of his is "Some Clients may insist on that sort of chicanery." I had to look that one up. And believe you me, we have read about the worst chicanery in the book. The book of chicanery, also called Problems in Legal Ethics. Anyway, I now have every intention to act professionally, and to get fewer than 900 parking tickets.

Turns out, doodling during class—or meetings—may actually help your concentration.

So says Newsweek anyway. I agree.

Doodling can be a good thing. If there's a choice between doodling and daydreaming, you're better off if your students are doodling. Of course, it's best if you aren't boring them at all, but doodling isn't necessarily a sign of your students being naughty—it's a sign that it may be hard for them to concentrate without something visual.

--psychologist Jackie Andrade of the University of Plymouth