One of my favorite podcasts is Slate’s Political Gabfest, and there’s this guy on there named David Plotz who’s had this theory for a long time now (for 5 or 6 years), and his theory is that we are going to evolve as a society where things like sexting or getting caught for something like that is not going to be the death knell of someone, because we’re all just going to get used to not paying attention to it, or not taking it seriously. When I first heard it, I thought it was stupid, and that would never happen, but now I do feel like we are moving a little in that direction.

I never Google applicants before I admit them. I don’t do that for a plethora of reasons. One, very practically, I don’t have the time. Number two, I really feel like it’s just wrong. It’s really not an attractive thing to do. Number three, I think there’s a really high possibility that I won’t understand it. I have children who are law school age. One of them doesn’t let me follow him on Twitter, and one does, but sometimes I don’t even understand what they’re talking about online. I don’t get their jokes, even though I know them really well. If I were looking at a stranger’s Twitter feed or Instagram posts, I think there’s a good chance I would misunderstand or misinterpret what I’m seeing. I just think it’s a very bad idea. I don’t look at TLS or your site LSL. I know some young people in my office do, but they know I don’t want to hear “this guy seems like a jerk so don’t admit him,” so I never hear about things like that. Sometimes they’ll tell me people don’t seem to understand this one thing we did, or people liked this one thing we did, but that’s about the extent of it.

I will give one warning. Sometimes people say things in their applications, like they’ll talk about jobs or groups that I don’t understand. It comes up a lot on resumes where people will have worked for a company that I’ve never heard of, and I can’t tell from their description what the company does. You’d think that wouldn’t happen that much, but you’d be amazed how often it does. So sometimes, if I’m thinking about admitting that person, I will Google the company so that I can understand what’s going on. And about two or three times in my life, doing that has led to information that was not favorable to the applicant, whether something was made up or it’s something sketchy. But really, that’s only two or three times out of maybe 500 times that I’ve done it, and out of more than 100,000 files I’ve read overall. That’s two or three people who didn’t get in who otherwise were likely to have gotten in, so the odds are extremely low. I would just say, I do think it’s prudent to be cautious.

Regarding the story about Harvard — that seems like exactly the kind of thing I wouldn’t want to do, because again I feel like there’s some humor there that I’m not getting, and it seems bad but I’m not really sure that it is unless I have a 17-year-old on staff if I’m Harvard undergrad admissions. I wouldn’t know what ot make of that. So I think that’s problematic. The article I read was unclear; they said “racist memes” were posted, but the description of them wasn’t clear. If something was jocular, I would really worry about making a decision based on it. So that’s why I don’t look at these things.

Some schools will though. That is one way that schools have of “yield protecting” — they’ll Google you and see if you’ve expressed interest in another school or committed to another school. I’m aware that that’s something that people do, so I do think that being cautious is a good idea. But I don’t know anyone who’s really trying to do a background check on people via the internet before they admit them, and I disapprove of it heavily.

People at my office tell me that there are at least a couple of people who are apparently people we’ve admitted who have used their actual names on TLS or Law School Life, and I think that’s charmingly naive. I just don’t think that’s the first thing you want to pop up when your name is Googled, your law school application chats, even if it’s totally harmless.