Law’s Purple Majesty (Reposted)
Concurring Opinions:
[Temple's graduation is today, and I'm getting dressed in my robes. In honor of the class of '08, I'm reposting something I wrote back in 2006, on why law school graduates wear purple.]
Purple otherwise symbolizes: royalty, over-writing, wisdom, indecision, insanity, equality and the Minnesota Vikings. Sounds about right. But what was the genesis of associating purple with law?
Interestingly, the dominant theory seems to be that academic dress recalls an era where laws flowed from the King: purple symbolizes lawyer’s roots as agents of the sovereign. And it is true that of the professions, the one with the closest tie with the institutions of state sanctioned force remains law. But you’ve got to wonder why the folks who codified academic dress in the U.S. decided to tie themselves to an idea of legal rules that evoked royalty, instead of, say, the brittle yellow of the constitution. Perhaps it is…