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IV
.
.
CONCLUSION: READING, TALKING,
AND THINKING LIKE A LAWYER
The first-year curriculum persists as it does because any other
one would mean that law teachers could no longer engage in
normative legal thought and might actually have to know some-
thing about the world and how it works. We might have to know
why cross default clauses appear routinely in loans. We might
have to know why the Supreme Court routinely accepts some
circuit conflicts and ignores the rest. We might even have to
know why the going rate for drunken assault is greater in Buf-
falo than in Tallahassee.
That would be inconvenient. When it comes to normative
legal thought, law teachers have a real comparative advantage
in the academy. Almost no one else does it, and one needs to
know relatively little detail about how the world works in order
to engage in the practice. . . . In contrast, when it comes to know-
ing about cross default clauses, circuit conflicts, and drunks in
Tallahassee, law professors clearly lack comparative advantage
as against both practitioners and other, more formally trained
empiricists like historians or sociologists.
1
T
hroughout this volume, we have followed the very particular shape of law-
yers’ training in the normative, mediated through attitudes toward text, au-
thority, and language. In subtle but powerful ways, the specific technical require-
ments of a legal reading guide students away from a more accustomed form of
moral reasoning, anchored more closely to social context. Instead, law students
begin to accept a form of moral reasoning in which context and normativity are
read only through the exigencies of legal tests and texts. Social context is un-
moored and thinned, rendered in almost commodified form: as the bits and pieces

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206
Conclusion
of information needed to create analogies in legal-textual frameworks. In the
process, legal reasoning gains an appearance of ubiquitous, indeed, promiscu-
ous engagement with social particulars, while building a core that is virtually
impervious to grounded social analysis. As Schlegel points out, this creates an
uneasy paradox in which courts must all the time make decisions about issues
that they are incapable of thoroughly grasping. Worse, it is possible that the sys-
tem of legal language hides from them even the truth of their own limitations.
At the same time, traditional outsider students continue to be differentially si-
lenced in the prototypical law school classroom, blocking one of many potential
routes by which alternative understandings of social contexts and norms could
enter the mainstream legal conversation. As such routes are closed in the course
of legal education, nascent lawyers learn an increasingly closed discourse, wid-
ening the gap between themselves and their future clients.

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Legal Language and American Law
207
9
.
.
Legal Language and American Law:
Authority, Morality, and Linguistic Ideology
207
W
e return now to the themes with which the book began, with the added
vantage given by our in-depth examination of similarities and differences
across the classrooms of this study. First, we have seen that context matters to
the understanding of law school training in a number of ways. In the classroom,
aspects of the immediate context are crucial in the dynamics that create more
and less inclusive discussions. These include, but are certainly not limited to, the
demographic backgrounds of students and professors, the size and linguistic
structuring of the class itself, and the status, history, location, and culture of the
law school. Contextual cues in class also point the way to the shared epistemol-
ogy that is conveyed in all of these classrooms, despite surface differences in dis-
course style. Finally, some kinds of context are ignored or omitted, creating a
blind spot in the understanding of social conflict taught to law students.
This brings us to a second important finding: the way legal language in this
society shares with capitalist epistemology more generally a kind of double edge.
In the second section of the chapter, I discuss this phenomenon, which carries with
it both a powerful potential and a potential danger. However, as the third section
of this conclusion argues, in the legal arena we see the primacy of language and
linguistic ideology in mediating this double edge. It is in and through the inculca-
tion of approaches to text, reading, and language that the legal version of
commodification—of a social structural sleight of hand—takes place. On the one
hand, this means that legal language is deeply imbricated with social power in
multiple ways. On the other hand, the independent importance of this linguistic
level means that the process of legal training in particular, and of legal translation
in general, cannot be analyzed as a mere reflex of power dynamics. Certainly social
power has an impact at the many levels delineated here. But we can also see that

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208
Conclusion
there are irreducible and contingent aspects of the interactions, identities, and
cultural understandings revealed and forged in the languages of law and of law
school classrooms.
Finally, we consider the broader implications of this study’s findings for policy
decisions about legal training and the legal system itself. If the law in a democratic
state aspires to apply to all citizens fairly, then the hidden exclusions that are cre-
ated by subtle cultural invisibility and cultural dominance in legal training and
language need to be addressed. Although there are no simple answers, one obvi-
ous starting point involves increased diversity and inclusion in the legal academy,
among law students, and in the legal profession more generally. This conclusion is
supported by both the quantitative and qualitative findings of the study. But in-
creased diversity will make little difference if any divergences in vision are stifled
through the process by which students are socialized (as they must be) to the can-
ons of a distinctively legal reading. Thus, another important step would be taken if
law schools were to achieve and teach a more self-conscious understanding of the
limitations of legal language for apprehending social phenomena, training students
to be wary of the hubris that inheres in law’s aspiration of universal translation
across so many diverse social realms.
The Importance of Context
The debate over inclusion and diversity in law school training (and in society more
generally) sometimes proceeds in terms of either/or choices, as if social differences
such as race and gender were either all-determining or nonexistent. This study
suggests an alternative vision, one that is more complicated and perhaps less satis-
fying to those who like their pictures of social reality painted in stark all-or-nothing
terms. This more complex view is compatible with recent, more contextualist ap-
proaches to the issue of social difference that have been proposed by scholars study-
ing race and gender, both in and outside the legal academy.
1