I have learned over the years from my two kids, both now adults, that many people, including no doubt law students and potential law students, view law professors as a different breed of animal.  I guess in my family we do push the envelope since my wife, Margaret Moses, and I are both law professors. The friends of our kids, and, indeed, my law students, are shocked to discover, for example, that in my youth I worked in the factory at what was then the Allen-Bradley company — on the seventh floor of the building with the largest four-sided clock in the world — and that, even in the summer after my first year in law school, I was a truck driver moving people’s household goods from one end of the country to the other. Somehow law professors, even before they are law professors, live such different, abstracted lives that it is beyond comprehension that one of them drove a truck as a summer job or worked in a factory making electrical resistors, whatever they are.

While my kids no doubt have good reason for thinking that I am weird in various ways, I think of myself as falling within the range of what could be called normal. I want my students to get some chance to agree, or have a closer look to decide that my self-assessment is way off track. So, here are two techniques I use. First, whenever I see a student of mine outside of class, I go out of my way to say hi and to chat: The ten second chat. Students are very aware of us but many are afraid of making the first move when they see us outside of the classroom. Reaching out to them breaks the ice. The downside, of course, is that I get it wrong. Early this semester, I was in the elevator with one of my students, so I started to chat.  Unfortunately, she was a student in a different class than I had assumed, so I am sure that she thought I was even weirder than she might have if I had said nothing at all. But it is a risk worth taking.

Second, I arrange “lunch bunches” with the students in my class.