Georgia Supreme Court Justice George Carley is exceedingly polite, a stickler for detail and an old-school dresser who almost always wears a coat and tie.

Carley awoke at 4 a.m. with intense chest pain, realizing it was a heart attack. He smoked a cigarette, thinking it would be his last, and then told his wife, Sandy, of his pain. She ordered him into the car for a trip to the hospital.

But wait: He’d forgotten one other thing, he told Sandy. Would she go back into the house and get his coat and tie? Carley might have been about to die, but he wasn’t about to die out of uniform.

Forget it, Sandy said.

Carley, who plans to retire at the end of his term in 2012, even wore his coat and tie when riding a mule in the Grand Canyon, the story says. “The mule didn’t mind,” he explains.

A lawyer has a uniform, and that uniform is a suit.