This duty includes importantly habits of responsiveness and timeliness. And so we have a norm that expects presence and participation, as an introduction to the fiduciary responsibility you will undertake in a few years. I have been talking about norms in the ethical sense, and here again it is particularly important to remember the difference between norms and sanctions. Our law school rules do allow faculty to invoke sanctions for failure to participate. Those sanctions include permitting a faculty member, on notice, to exclude a student from the examination for non-attendance.
Faculty members differ on their readiness to use that sanction.
But whatever their approach to the choice of sanctions, the great majority of faculty do not differ on the norms of attendance and participation or their institutional importance. Finally, let me say a word about competition and ethics. I would like to tell you that law school is a cooperative rather than a competition-based institution. Indeed, I think that should be the case and believe that, at Cornell, it is true to a very great extent. However, I would be naive and perhaps dishonest to deny the existence of some element of competition in law school, driven largely by market considerations.