As my students in Constitutional Law are well aware, my Con Law professor in law school was Archibald Cox. If you doubt me, you can look it up on his Wikipedia entry, where someone saw fit to memorialize that fact. No one ever bothered to ask me what grade I received. At this time of the year, when many of my students are coming by my office to discuss their final grade, it may be comforting for some to learn that Professor Cox gave me a “B.” I still think that he undervalued my class participation.
He Gave Me A “B”
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Your post reminds me of the practice of our late Dean Howard Eisenberg (memorialized recently here: http://law.marquette.edu/facultyblog/2009/06/04/remembering-howard-b-eisenberg/), who posted his law school transcript from the University of Wisconsin in a public place near his office. (If we had a blog in his era, I suspect he would have put his transcript there, too.) As I recall, the transcript revealed a slow start, followed by progressively improving grades. The healthy message to students: grades (especially first-year grades) are not everything. And there are indeed many other lawyers who have had equally distinguished careers who were hardly academic stand-outs as first-year students.