Mitch beat me to it. HLS business cards. As if most Harvard Law students have any problem at all getting the word "Harvard" into a conversation and need business cards to help them out. Okay, let me take this seriously for a second. I suppose there are occasional instances where I want to give my e-mail address to someone, or my phone number, or my weblog address. Perhaps a pre-printed slip of paper would be useful. I can't really think of an instance where I would have used one if I had them, but I can pretend. Say I wander into some sort of let-us-pay-you-to-write-stuff job fair by accident and the editor of Random-Thoughts-From-Law-Students'-Minds Magazine wants to run a column of mine but he needs me to give him my e-mail address and phone number, and neither of us has a pen. Then maybe. Although I could probably just borrow a pen from someone. Aside from the mental image of handing someone a business card that says "Harvard Law Student" on it -- which is a cringeworthy mental image, of course -- it's the notion that most of the people I would be dealing with I imagine don't have an infrastructure for dealing with business cards. If someone hands me a business card, I'm most likely to throw it in a drawer somewhere and never look at it again. It's not how I store information. But maybe this all doesn't make sense to me because I'm not really a typical law student. Maybe if I went to a legal job fair, or -- what else do lawyers do -- uh, maybe if I found myself at the scene of a school bus accident, and I wanted all of the injured children to have their parents call me so I can give them some no-strings-attached advice about their rights in the legal system, then, perhaps, I might need a business card. Maybe if I encountered a potential client on the street, and, again, I had no pen and wanted to look like a jackass, then, maybe, I'd need a business card. It's very hard for me to get the mental image out of my mind though, that even if this was a useful thing to have, which I'm still not so sure it is, I would look like there was something mentally wrong with me if I were to carry around a stack of business cards that announce I'm a Harvard Law student and give them to people. Any benefit they would have in terms of giving someone information about me would be more than mitigated, I think, by how pompous and ridiculous it seems.

But maybe I'm just wrong. Maybe I see business cards as something different than what they really are, and there's really no social connotation at all other than, "here's an easy way for you to have my e-mail address at your fingertips." It's possible Mitch and I are just strange. And will find our lack of business contacts crippling in the near future because we don't have preprinted cards that announce how high our law school is ranked in the US News Rankings.