by Richard W. Millar, Jr.

“Back in the day,” as they say, I would wax my own car. For some inexplicable reason, I can remember that I often used a product called “Turtle Wax.” Its slogan, I also remember, was “the only wax with the hard shell finish.” I have no idea if they still make Turtle Wax and I have no idea why I remember the slogan when I can’t remember what I had for dinner last night.

I also remember one time, probably in the mid-fifties. My brother and I were home with our Mom when Dad called on the phone. I wasn’t paying attention to the call until she asked him where he was calling from. He said: “the driveway.” Since there was no phone in the garage, much less one in the driveway, we ran out to see what he was talking about. Sure enough, he had a telephone implanted on the console near the gear shift on his Thunderbird. It worked by radio. You had to depress a button to talk and release it to listen. It was about the coolest thing my brother and I had ever seen. Our mother took a dim view of it, which, of course, made it all the more interesting.

A couple of decades and law school later, when I had moved to Orange County with my family, I, too, got a car phone. This was well before cell phones and had to be hard wired into the car. It looked great but was very expensive to use. Also, I don’t think my kids were as impressed as my brother and I had been years earlier.

During roughly the same period, I started having my car detailed. As far as I can tell, detailing is the same as waxing, but it costs more. Sort of like calling a used car “pre-owned.”

One day, while looking at an especially large car phone bill, I noticed that one very high charge accounted for most of the bill. It was a call to Sacramento. The number meant nothing to me and I had no memory of any reason to call anyone in Sacramento. I could not, for the life of me, figure it out.

Since I could not think of anything else, I called the number. A man answered. At first, it was one of those wonderfully ambiguous conversations between two somewhat suspicious strangers trying to decide whether to hang up or keep talking.

Finally, after some minutes of metaphorically treading water, he asked, out of the blue: “Do you have your car detailed?” Startled by this abrupt change of subject, I said, “yes.” He then asked, “What’s his name?” I gave him the name. While I have long since forgotten the detailer’s name, I remember the reply: “That sonofabitch is dating my daughter.”

So now you know all I know about waxing which, obviously, isn’t much. I probably could not pass a law school exam on the subject.

Particularly if the question was given by Professor Reginald Robinson.

Professor Robinson is a professor at Howard University School of Law in Washington, D.C. He teaches agency.

Question number 5 on one of his exams involved a person (read: plaintiff) who went to the “Day Spa & Massage Therapy Company” and ordered a “Full Brazilian Wax,” which I have now discovered has nothing to do with cars and, for all I know, has nothing to do with Brazilians either. The question for the exam-taker was, after all was said and done—and a lot more was done than said, was the salon and/or the salon employee liable for improper touching. (The pre-plaintiff had allegedly fallen asleep during the process, which, at least to me, seems to be anything but sleep-inducing, and had signed an elaborate consent form.) The question asked, essentially, in whose favor the court would rule.

The whole thing went from the hypothetical salon to the real world quickly when two students filed complaints against the professor for sexual and “gender-based” harassment.

A university administrator concluded that the examination question constituted sexual harassment and the professor has been ordered to take sensitivity training and submit future exam questions to the school for review before giving them to the students. He has also been warned that he may be terminated if found guilty of any other Title IX violations.

Perhaps if he had called it a “Full Brazilian Detail” he would have been okay.

Richard W. Millar, Jr. is a member of the firm of Friedman Stroffe & Gerard, P.C. in Newport Beach. He can be reached at rmillar@fsglawyers.com.