There are a lot of professional activities that involve the display of personal bios. What I didn't start out life realizing, until I spoke at a conference, is that everybody writes their own bio.

Maybe because bios utilize the third-person voice we assume they come from an actual third person. But of course, they don't. As it turns out, there is no situation where there's a staff biographer who takes your resume, conducts a brief phone interview, and then dashes off a pithy summary of your life and career. That's true of obituaries. But not bios.

Once you know this, you might cultivate (as I have) a hobby of reading bios. Anywhere, anytime. Once you know they're all self-penned, they take on a whole new dimension. A bio represents a person's opinion of how they wish to be seen by the outside world, a rare chance to play Boswell to their own reflexive Johnson.

This is especially true with faculty bios. When a professor writes that he is "beloved by generations of students", that's not a statement put there by the school administration. He wrote it. True or not.

I will go through the UCLA law bios and post some of the better nuggets for you.

09 Apr 06