I would follow up with, if the shoe was on the other foot, do you believe that a lawyer with tattoos and or purple hair should be allowed to practice?
We may never agree? But I think that we should be more tolerant of individuality than prejudice.
There is procedure and standards in document filing for a reason, this is more difficult to read than a white background.
I'd be comfortable establishing a stronger dress code for courtrooms - wear business casual or some such - but dyed hair and tattoos aren't easily fixable mistakes if you get called to court, so they have to be permitted for at least the defendant. For attorneys, it's probably fine to say that those with purple hair and tattoos can practice but not appear in a courtroom to represent a client. They can prep and file a patent but not represent you in a trial. That is, of course, if most people would hire an attorney with purple hair and tattoos. I would not do that unless I wanted to somehow get the death penalty for a speeding ticket.
He's also a USMC veteran. Stereotypes can be funny like that.
This would also be true in e.g. M&A. Even if Cravath's fieriest new partner looked like that I'd hesitate to hire him. Patent law might be an exception, but if I needed to actually go to court, WilmerHale's top guy would still be a liability. Even in a bench trial the judge could see it as disrespectful or look down on my representation because of it. You see my meaning here?
On the table, the surgeon's appearance has little or nothing to do with his ability; in court, a lawyer's appearance can be crucial.
Your surgeon paradox says that if someone is successful despite not looking the part, they must be all the better. But are there lawyers with face tattoos or crazy hair that are considered successful in high stakes criminal law in front of juries? For corporate or patent or tax law, that is so much about a deep intimate understanding of hundreds of thousands of pages of ultra specific “loopholes” and optimization strategies, I would not be surprised if there were lawyers who look very alternative. But criminal law lives and dies on persuading people who are not legal experts.
[1] https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/criminal-defense/can-an-o...
If you were a brilliant lawyer strongly committed to your craft, you would not get tattoos or dye your hair purple. The reason is simple: too many people would see it and think less of you. As such, it makes you less able to effectively defend your clients. When your job involves appealing to society on behalf of someone, you do not make a middle finger to that same society an immutable part of your appearance unless you are very thoughtless, also not a characteristic I want in a attorney.
There's also the fact that law, more than most disciplines, is premised on adherence to old, old forms of tradition and ritual. In britain they still wear powdered wigs, for goodness' sake. The law still uses Latin terms though it's decades to centuries since educated men learned it in school. Our legal tradition in America is old, with Common Law in some ways tracing back to William the Conqueror. The other major legal tradition on which I've read, Justinian's Codex and its evolution into the Napoleonic Code, dates back to the 500s AD. Discarding old customs, even if you think them outmoded, trampling social niceties because you find them outmoded, is a really bad sign for a capable attorney.
Yes, they should be allowed to practice, because a lawyer’s tattoos and purple hair do not have anything to do with court documents and readability of those. Exceptions obviously apply, as not all tattoos are created equal, and having a visible gang-affiliation tattoo or a tattoo saying “cop killer” (which actually happened, but to a defendant) might be problematic as a lawyer.
Here is an analogy that might help: my employer might not care if someone communicates in offtopic employee chats using gifs and emojis, but I can easily see an employee getting fired for doing the same thing either to an external customer or in cross-org sev 0 incident threads.