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assertion
 but to a failure of
rights commitment. . . . To say that blacks never fully believed in rights is true. Yet it
is also true that blacks believed in them so much and so hard that we gave them life
where there was none before; we held onto them, put the hope of them into our
wombs, mothered them and not the notion of them. . . . “Rights” feel new in the
mouths of most black people. It its still deliciously empowering to say. . . . The con-
cept of rights, both positive and negative, is the marker of our citizenship.
16
Even where rights are spelled out in constitutions or legislation, it is the applica-
tion of this legal language in particular cases, performed in the United States in
part through the mechanism of case law references and readings, that gives it life.
And that process, like the concept itself, relies partially on the ongoing delinea-
tion, through doctrinal development, of abstract categories that guide the analo-
gies by which one particular situation may be rendered similar to another.
At the same time, we have also seen that the very move away from context into
abstract categories that permits this kind of promise for the disempowered in legal
arenas also contains a dangerous erasure. Some aspects of morality and context
that disappear in the common law sleight of hand actually hold keys to decipher-
ing the social meaning of the conflict at hand, as Regina Austin notes. And the
apparent neutrality of this process conceals the overall truth that in the U.S. legal
system, despite some important victories for the disempowered, it is dispropor-
tionately the “haves” who come out ahead—just as, in the analogical process by

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214
Conclusion
which common law jurists make one concrete situation equivalent to another, the
move between abstract and concrete also contains hidden cultural assumptions.
17
We have traced in some detail the way this process works in the law school class-
room, shifting students’ attention away from social contextual cues and norma-
tive assessment toward layers of legal-textual authority.
Baker perceptively summarizes the multiple effects of the classroom shift docu-
mented in my study.
18
 In addition to erasing socially relevant aspects of context
that are not important to legal doctrine, legal reasoning “reformulates relatively
concrete facts at higher levels of abstraction,” losing the “detailed particulars of a
socially situated narrative” in its quest for commensurability.
19
 It also “disrupts what
small amount of phenomenological narrative coherence remains in a case” as it
prioritizes analogical comparison.
20
 Finally, students are unmoored from ethical
and social identities, attached to new legal roles as adversarial speakers on either
side of an argument. This substitutes an amoral attachment to legal form for a
situated sense of loyalty to substantive ends and values.
21
 Hirsch notes that in
this setting dominant cultural forms are “highly visible,” from the ready control
of discourse exercised disproportionately by white male students through the pre-
dominance of decontextualized language that “tends toward disconnection from
moral entailments.”
22
 Although this patterning is indeed quite visible from the
outside, it is also true that metalinguistic speech and ideology in law school class-
rooms naturalize the dominance of one cultural form over others.
23
 Thus, some-
thing that is actually culturally shaped takes on the appearance of being neutral
or natural. Winter makes a similar point about the tacit power of seemingly
uncontroversial categorization processes, which smuggle normative content into
legal decision making: “Law is always ideological in the sense that it enforces (and
reinforces) the dominant normative views of the culture.”
24
 This study adds the
insight that an inevitably social dimension of law is also “imported,” as Jonathan
Yovel would say, through pragmatics and metapragmatics.
25
 Yovel’s theory of “nor-
mative importation” carefully delineates the mechanisms by which language in
general (and legal language in particular) is always quietly drawing on and inter-
nalizing social norms. The tacit character of this linguistic structuring makes its
effects difficult to discern.
Language, Linguistic Ideology, and Legal Epistemology:
Within and beyond Social Power
As we have examined the process by which law students are initiated into an ab-
stract-yet-concrete approach to human conflict, we have continually observed the
central mediating role of language and linguistic ideology. Susan Philips’s pioneer-
ing sociolinguistic article on legal education described the process as, at core, lin-
guistic, as “learning the cant.”
26
 In an early article on the topic, James Elkins also
pointed out the central role of 
talking
 like a lawyer to the construction of the legal
persona and its characteristic mode of thought.
27
 I have built on their observations
here to delineate the way this language-learning process relies on an ideology of
text and language—a linguistic ideology. Focusing on ideology, according to

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Legal Language and American Law
215
Woolard and others, “makes a promising bridge between linguistic and social
theory.”
28
 As have linguistic anthropologists working in other settings, I, too, have
found that linguistic ideology forms a crucial organizing backbone for ongoing
linguistic interaction and socialization. Michael Silverstein notes that
any indexical process, wherein signs point to a presupposed context in which they
occur (i.e., have occurred) or to an entailed potential context in which they occur (i.e.,
will have occurred), depends on some metapragmatic function to achieve a measure
of determinacy or textual coherence. . . . It turns out that the crucial position of ide-
ologies of semiosis is in constituting such a “default” mediating metapragmatics. . . .
In short, ideology construes indexicality by constituting its metapragmatics. . . . Ide-
ologies present invokable schemata in which to explain/interpret the meaningful flow
of indexicals.
29
In socializing law students to a new ideology of language and text, law professors
accomplish a profound reorientation in the initiates’ very processing of the “flow
of indexicals” that is the foundation of communication. Thus, the role of language
ideology as a backbone is particularly highlighted in this setting by the specific role
that language plays in legal epistemology.
As we have seen, there is an unusually central role for linguistic ideology in
law school socialization, because it is in and through manipulations of language
that nascent attorneys learn to wield the special power of their profession. Proper
application of the legal tests and categories, gleaned from a proper legal reading of
written legal texts, is the foundation on which legally trained professionals draw in
claiming authority. Thus, the linguistic ideology that undergirds legal training
orients students’ attention to layers of legal-textual authority. There is no need to
claim that we will generate factual accuracy (in the usual sense) from such a read-
ing, for the core compass orienting the reader remains “what the court, or legisla-
ture, said”—and then, in turn, what the position of that court or legislature was in
the hierarchy of legal text generators. What we accept as true for the purposes of
making a legal decision may not conform accurately to what happened, but that is
rarely a matter of concern; once a court has met certain threshold requirements (it
has jurisdiction to decide the matter, its decision was not clearly erroneous, etc.),
it has the performative power to
 find
 facts. Thus, the legal reader’s task is not to
uncover what actually happened (more usually the mandate of the social scien-
tist), but to correctly discern the facts as found by the authoritative court. These
facts, read through a filter of doctrinal language also extracted from written legal
texts, must then be sorted out in a way that permits the building of analogies.
To accomplish this requires a reading focused on layers of authoritative lan-
guage and oriented by linguistic ideology. This linguistic ideology equates the
proper alignment of language with authoritative legal knowledge, and thus also with
proper application of the law. Legal epistemology rests on linguistic processes:
expert deciphering of written legal texts, appropriate use of analogies and concomi-
tant legal-linguistic frames, making arguments within these frames, ability to speak
in the various voices and from the various stances required to argue effectively
(sometimes to anticipate your opponent’s argument, sometimes to make an argu-
ment for your client, or, if you are a judge, to weave between alternative positions

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216
Conclusion
in coming to a decision, which may in turn instantiate yet another point of view).
In other words, in legal language, we know this fact because it was found and
written down (entextualized) by an authoritative court, operating under correct
metalinguistic rules and with the proper authority. One of the miracles of this
system is its ability to combine certainty with such a flexible—indeed, at times de-
liberately agnostic—approach to social reality. The legal epistemology taught in
the prototypical first-year U.S. law classroom, embodied in the practice of learn-
ing to read cases, employs a set of linguistic procedures to generate knowledge that
is at once flexible enough to encompass almost any conceivable context, while still
generating certainty (defined within linguistic parameters) and rules with know-
able parameters (again linguistic), that nevertheless change as they are applied.
From a world in which normative judgment is circumscribed by a rich sense
of social context—who someone was, the full depth of feelings and motives that
inspired certain actions, the circumstances that conspired to push events in one
way or another, personal histories, social inequalities, and more—law students are
moved into a new world, in which legal judgment is circumscribed by linguistic
norms, texts and the arguments they permit, and layers of authoritative language.
The orienting compass that guides them is metalinguistic in the strongest sense:
an ideology of language that circumscribes social reality completely. Justice is done
if the proper linguistic protocols are observed, if the opposition of voices is liter-
ally represented in apparently dialogic form in court and in written opinions—as
it is also in law school classrooms. Gal and Irvine would call this “iconicity”: lin-
guistic ideology reading language form as a mirror of social phenomena.
30
(It is
also an example of “erasure,” because a focus on procedure renders invisible the
ways some oppositional voices and viewpoints are not making it into the discus-
sion at all.) As Morris explains, a core aim of legal reasoning is “to rupture linguis-
tic forms, polite forms, non-lawyerly forms, and to introduce a necessary pugilism”
as it imposes “a limiting order, an institutionalized order, a boundarying of ratio-
nality.”
31
As I’ve demonstrated, this reorientation in epistemology is accomplished
in large part through a shift in linguistic practices, effectuated in and through a
shift in linguistic ideologies.
The intimate relationship between linguistic ideology and legal epistemol-
ogy has been noted by a number of language-and-law scholars in recent years.
Susan Hirsch has carefully dissected the role of linguistic ideology in Kenyan
courts, demonstrating that conceptions about words and their proper deploy-
ment in courtroom storytelling effectively frame and limit what can be said and
known about social conflict.
32
 Greg Matoesian takes this insight into U.S. court-
rooms, using a detailed analysis of speech to show “how linguistic ideologies
interface in a reflexive moment with male hegemony and structures of language
use to form an epistemological strategy. . . . What counts as knowledge, as a
fact, and how do we know?”
33
 And in her volume on changes of plea in Ari-
zona courts, Susan Philips traces how judges appeal to a monolithic “legal in-
terpretive framework” that undergirds “the claims of lawyers to a universalistic
scientific and moral epistemology and to direct apprehension of this epistemol-
ogy by an individual mind rather than a sociocultural mind.”
34
 Her analysis dem-
onstrates that metalinguistic ideology regarding the relationship of written text

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Legal Language and American Law
217
to spoken practice operates to conceal the politically laden, structured diversity
found in judges’ actual use of language, despite judges’ own metalinguistic as-
sertions to the contrary. In this study, we have examined in detail the core tenets
of this U.S. legal interpretive framework and have reconfirmed the central role
of linguistic ideology to legal epistemology.
The introduction of metalinguistic mediation into our model of law brings
with it an interesting paradox. On the one hand, I have outlined the way linguistic
filtering conceals the impact of social power, in the process contributing to the
perpetuation of social inequalities through law. Future lawyers and judges are
trained in a metalinguistic structure that directs attention away from some aspects
of social norms and contexts, permitting the professionals charged with perform-
ing legal analysis to ignore systematic inequities in society and in the administra-
tion of the legal system itself. At the same time, this metalinguistic level is not simply
a reflex of power dynamics, transparently converting the interests of the powerful
into legal results. As Patricia Williams and others have pointed out, relatively pow-
erless members of society have occasionally prevailed in legal settings.
35
 And not
every problem addressed by the legal system is reducible to a straightforward cal-
culus in which the contesting parties stand for power interests in the wider soci-
ety; nor do the people involved in legal cases uniformly understand themselves or
their choices in these terms. Of course, where law intercedes, issues of power are
never very far away.
36
 But it is important to recognize as well how linguistic me-
diation introduces an irreducible dynamic of its own, imbued with cultural cre-
ativity and responsive to particular contexts and people. In this sense, I take seriously
Constable’s admonition against reducing our understanding of law and justice to
a monolithic focus on power.
37
In demonstrating that language and culture together bring dynamics of their
own to bear on legal processes, findings from linguistic anthropology can be said
to partially parallel insights drawn from the cognitive sciences. For example, Win-
ter has argued that regularities in the structuring of “cognitive and cultural infra-
structures” explain core aspects of legal reasoning.
38
He contrasts this view with
the assumptions of a standard or narrow “rationalist” model, which understands
reason as “linear, hierarchical, propositional, and definitional.”
39
 The process of
analogical reason that is fundamental to law can seem arbitrary when judged by
this rationalist model, but when analyzed in terms of embodied cognitive catego-
ries and structures (metaphors, for example, or image schemas), legal reasoning
seems far more principled.
40
 The cognitive approach described by Winter is in some
ways complementary to the linguistic anthropological analysis undertaken in this
book, while also differing in some important respects. For example, the two ap-
proaches both look to aspects of pragmatism and social context in parsing legal
epistemology, although their emphasis in this regard is quite different. Similarly,
both forms of analysis insist that there are regularities, anchored to context and
culture, that are often ignored by dominant paradigms focusing on propositionality.
In this sense, both perspectives push us to look past an either/or mentality which
insists that either legal reasoning is entirely governed by a narrow, positivist ratio-
nality, or it is not ordered at all. On the one hand, attempts to generate static, propo-
sitional rules that can predict legal decision making fail, because they are too sterile

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218
Conclusion
to capture the ongoing social-contextual creativity of actual legal problems and
decisions. On the other hand, the nihilist despair into which disappointed skep-
tics then fall, concluding that legal results reflect “what the judge ate for breakfast”
or naked economic interests, underestimates the powerful regularities of pragmatics
in cultural process.
41
Here, however, cognitivists and anthropological linguists part company, for
whereas cognitivists look to the contextual and grounded character of human cat-
egorization for pragmatic regularities, linguists examine the actual process by which
these categories (and other, messier regularities in human communication) are
given life in speech. Although cognitive analysis focuses extensively on the language
of metaphor, metonymy, and cultural categorization, it does not examine language
as a system in use. Because of its central concern with the way individuals internal-
ize cognitive maps, the school of cognitive theory on which Winter relies tends to
brush quickly by issues of social and group processes, where anthropological lin-
guistics and sociolinguists explicitly examine structures of social interaction and
cultural exchange. Depending on what (metaphorical!) perspective we adopt, we
can see this either as a conflict (with each side holding warring visions of how prag-
matics order social and legal knowledge) or a happy division of labor (with each
school attending to important and complementary issues).
42
 Whatever one’s van-
tage, it is striking to note that both approaches urge us to abandon a polarized logic,
in which the language of law is (or should be) either entirely determinative of out-
comes or a transparent reflection of social context. Similarly, I would urge that we
abandon a dichotomy that views linguistic exchange as either entirely devoid of
power dimensions or as completely determined by social power.
43
From the perspective of law and literature, James Boyd White has similarly
appealed for us to take seriously the particular combined linguistic-cultural-ethical
orientation that characterizes law as a field. He grants that law should not be taught
“without economics, or politics, or psychology, or history” (and I would add soci-
ology and anthropology, at the very least!), but White also insists that none of these
should be permitted to completely displace the study of law
as a distinctive activity of mind and imagination. . . . It is, and should be taught as, a
discipline of thought and argument with its own structure, its own elements, at the
center of which is the activity of claiming meaning for human experience, individu-
ally and collectively, and doing so in a language that is at once a source of authority
and itself subject to perpetual revision.
44
This leads White to advocate a “revived case method” as the ideal format for law
teaching, one in which a law student will approach cases as practice for the real
world, learning to think and live
at once with the materials of law, its language and institutions, and with the realities
of the world: the needs of her client, the demands of the other lawyer, the character
of the judge and jury. And this offers [the law student] a life in which . . . she is called
upon to have and recognize real commitments.
45
In many ways, White is calling for an approach that linguistic anthropologists would
endorse: one that takes seriously the indigenous language and culture of the legal

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Legal Language and American Law
219
field, while also opening the door to interdisciplinary studies of law as it interacts
with society, economics, politics, psychology, and so forth. However, the question
of how we are to balance these two ways of understanding law is a difficult one,
and White tends to take a very optimistic view of the possibilities for “intellectual
integration” among diverse disciplines.
46
By contrast, Dorf (like Schlegel, with whom we opened this section) presents
a pessimistic view of the likelihood that those trained in law can or will obtain the
expertise necessary to translate empirical research:
Legal questions almost invariably call for some mixture of normative and empirical
analysis. Although the Socratic method can be used to lay bare the empirical assump-
tions associated with various normative claims, it provides no tools for testing those
assumptions. . . . Despite legal realism’s successful critique . . . , to a significant de-
gree American legal education and American legal reasoning continue to proceed from
Langdell’s premise that the answers to difficult legal questions are to be found in the
reports of judicial decisions.
47
We have seen empirical support for Dorf ’s characterization in the transcripts of
this study: when it is time to discuss the assumptions about society and people that
underlie the judicial decisions students read, law professors routinely invite specu-
lation and anecdote. When law professors stray into the realms addressed by the
social sciences, there is no attempt to achieve the kind of “internal” interdiscipli-
nary understanding of other fields urged by White. (Nor is there any reason, given
what we now know about law school training, to expect that they would have been
given the tools to do so.) By contrast, students are faced with systematic demands
for proof and evidence when they are discussing legal texts and tests. White would
doubtless respond that his optimism about the possibilities of genuine interdisci-
plinary integration is more a hope for the future than a description of the current
state of our academic discourse. But one concern that lingers after a close exami-
nation of current law teaching is the closed nature of the linguistic system taught
to first-year law students. Without some countervailing instruction, this system
can easily lend itself to a form of methodological arrogance, in which its practitio-
ners feel themselves able to master any material with which they are presented by
running it through a legal reading. This kind of reading has its strengths, but it
also has its blind spots, and unlike many social science fields (although certainly
not all), law’s metalinguistic structure does not have a mechanism by which its own
basic orientations and structure of authority can be opened to question.
48
 To the
contrary, it inculcates a sense of rampant capacity to translate all kinds of events
and situations without regard to the possibility that the translation may miss the
mark in important ways, or that it needs to be open to alternative sources of au-
thority and epistemologies.
Silverstein warns of the kind of “misfire” that can occur when would-be
“translators” imagine that they can transparently move between different cul-
turally embedded systems of meaning, denying the inevitable “transformation”
that must occur in this situation.
49
 The further we move into the kind of mean-
ing that relies on context and pragmatics, the less likely the possibility of trans-
parency becomes, and, to the degree that the translator is unaware of this problem,

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220
Conclusion
the more likely it is that he will have a mistaken conception of what it is he is actu-
ally accomplishing. This is the foundation for Silverstein’s insistence that cultures
as we usually conceive them cannot actually be translated in the usual sense of the
word, because any attempt to explain the meaning of one cultural system in the
language of another involves an inevitable transformation. This is also true of at-
tempts to communicate between disciplines that have very different starting pre-
mises. The more we assume transparency in this situation, the less accurate our
understanding will become. If this is the case, then there is reason to fear much
inaccuracy in legal attempts at translation, because the gap between legal and other
possible frames is not adequately problematized or theorized in standard legal
approaches. To be fair, it’s important to note that social scientists sometimes also
proceed as if it were possible to understand law from the inside, or to communi-
cate with legal professionals, without any real effort at translation—an equally
mistaken approach (although probably without the same social ramifications, given
the very different institutional positions and functions of legal and social science
discourse).
Cultural Invisibility/Dominance and “Neutral” Legal Language:
Law School and Legal Categories in a Democratic State
At a very broad level, this study has outlined a tension between abstract categories
and conceptions of justice, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the demo-
cratic ideals of inclusion that require social, contextual, and grounded moral rea-
soning. When considered in terms of this tension, the problem of cultural invisibility/
dominance in legal training emerges as a profound challenge. There is without ques-
tion a certain genius to a linguistic-legal framework that treats all individuals the
same, in safely abstract layers of legal categories and authorities, regardless of so-
cial identity or context. And the framework is still more powerful because of its
ability to gobble up contextual details from each particular case, run them through
a purportedly neutralizing filter of analogy and doctrine, and reach results that are
at once guided by rules and yet that also are always changing those rules through a
shifting ground of constructed facts. At the same time, this process conceals the
ways legal results are often quite reflective of existing power dynamics, while si-
multaneously pulling lawyers away from grounded moral judgment and fully
contextualized consideration of human conflict. This can produce an ongoing
alienation: of legal decision making from ethics and of lawyers from socially shared
values. The legal system itself, while purporting to serve all citizens equally, can
hide behind the screen provided by its legal-linguistic filter, concealing even from
itself the way that inequities are integral to its structure. There is no easy or quick
fix to solve this dilemma; professors cannot cease teaching their students the epis-
temological-linguistic frame they will need to use in practice. Clearly, however, to
confront the problem we need the kind of understanding that research such as that
presented in this book can provide.
50
 And, as Burns has eloquently argued, there is
ground for hope that some counterbalance can be achieved through other kinds
of legal discourses: the blend, for example, that is found in the trial, or in the more

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Legal Language and American Law
221
clinically based education that attempts to prepare students for trials, mediations,
and client interviews.
51
 However, as even the most ardent advocates of alternative
approaches to legal training admit, the linguistic system that I have outlined in this
book remains the lingua franca through which all attorneys must at some point
operate, and so cannot be easily dismissed or ignored.
52
The great question here, as in so many other domains of this society, remains
whether it is possible to keep the powerful positive aspects of one side of this
double edge without having also to accept the deleterious aspects of the other
side. This is a question that has obvious global dimensions, as the hegemony of
Western approaches to law, justice, and social context undergoes ever more rapid
expansion internationally.
53
 Of course, its impact in each part of the world will
work through particular mediations dictated in part by local circumstances, and
the hegemonic vision will itself shift and be partially reconstructed in this pro-
cess.
54
 But as we see the inexorable march of social change that spreads the “rule
of law” but also carries with it deepening class disparities, widespread dissolu-
tion of older forms of social cohesion and accompanying normative grounding,
and in some cases increased criminal violence, the task of analyzing this particu-
lar aspect of a hegemonic ideology takes on added urgency.
55
 The double edge of
legal reasoning uncovered in U.S. law school classroom discourse offers the pos-
sibilities but also the dangers that come with this move to a particular form of
abstraction, which can erase those aspects of social context that lead to bias, but
can also obliterate aspects of the social surround that permit an in-depth under-
standing of social inequalities. Facing this dilemma is a crucial task for any legal
system with democratic ideals, and it is a core challenge confronting those using
the legal language through which such a system operates. Whether through di-
rect export of American legalism, or through its indirect effect on U.S. legal-
political attitudes and policies, this challenge is rapidly reaching far beyond the
geographic borders of the United States.
What, then, are we to make of this powerful, linguistically circumscribed sys-
tem of legal knowledge? Through linguistic analysis we can see the centrality of
discursive patterning and ideologies of language to wider social processes. In some
cases, as we have noted, the web of language surrounding legal decision making
can be viewed as a protection for those with less power. On the other hand, there
is cause for concern regarding systematic exclusion or marginalization of the very
aspects of social context that might matter most to the powerless. If those wielding
the analogies and formulating the linguistic ideologies tend to be relatively homo-
geneous in terms of race, gender, class, and other socially situated features of iden-
tity, then there is less chance that alternative views and approaches will be heard.
(This directs our attention to the elites in the legal profession as particularly im-
portant sources of decisions about the construction of legal frames.) The very con-
struction of fact from complex contexts, as well as the selection of salient facts for
analogical reasoning, tacitly draws on deeply cultural assumptions (although the
process represents itself as natural and neutral).
56
 It seems unlikely that we will be
able to achieve a truly democratic legal system with a homogeneous judiciary guid-
ing this process, or with homogeneous legal education setting the scene for what
transpires as law students enter the profession.

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222
Conclusion
Furthermore, the law school classroom is itself arguably the site of more than
lessons about technical law. As Weinstein notes, educational research has demon-
strated that how we structure classroom interactions affects how we “create set-
tings in which students can learn lessons of caring, justice, and self-worth.”
57
 Studies
from educational settings where teachers and researchers have sought new solu-
tions, rather than giving up on students of color, have shown us that changes in
pedagogical structure and philosophy can make an enormous difference.
58
 The
benefits from successful racial integration in classrooms extend to white students
as well as students of color, and they also extend beyond more narrowly conceived
educational advantages (which have indeed been demonstrated), to wider social
benefits. The synergy between the educational and social advantages is only height-
ened in law school settings, where part of what nascent attorneys must learn is the
wider perspective needed to write, administer, and enforce laws in a diverse, demo-
cratic society. A study of Harvard and University of Michigan law students has
documented that the students themselves feel diversity in law school to be a vital
component of their legal education; as one student said, “I cannot see how law can
be properly learned without diverse perspectives and opinions.”
59
 Another student
in the study noted that “cultural and ethnic diversity is more important in law school
than many other studies,” and this perspective was broadly shared by the majority
of the students surveyed in both schools.
60
Diversity in the classroom, then, is beneficial to white students, to the overall
project of legal education in our society, and to those students of color who suc-
ceed. Ironically, a recent study has raised the difficult question of whether it is
beneficial to those students of color who do not succeed.
61
 The ensuing debate over
affirmative action in law school has raised a number of important issues that beg
for further study. One thing seems clear: the law school experience itself still seems
to be differentially damaging to some students of color. There is a fierce debate
over why. A question that has emerged from this debate is whether it would be
better for African American students overall if law schools were to abolish affir-
mative action.
62
 There appears to be agreement that doing so would diminish the
numbers of African American students in elite law schools, a prospect that has raised
some understandable worries about the potential impact on the (already slow)
process of integration at the highest levels of our nation’s legal and political sys-
tems.
63
 In this regard, an important concern raised by the present study is the pos-
sibility that lowering the size of the minority cohorts at elite schools would have a
cascading effect on even the students of color who are successful under the cur-
rent system, now left without the support of a cohort (and likely with diminishing
numbers of role models on the faculty and in the higher echelons of the profes-
sion).
64
 Certainly, before giving up on real integration and facing major losses to
so many of their students and educational goals, law schools should consider the
paths that have been successfully followed in other educational settings, where
pedagogical innovation has benefited not only students of color, but all students
involved.
65
 In this way, law schools could better serve all of their students, while
also providing an educational experience that best prepares all future lawyers for
the practice of law in a democratic state and diverse world.
66

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Legal Language and American Law
223
One part of this step would involve more sophisticated and careful attention
to details of law school and classroom culture and context.
67
 Another important
step would be taken if those trained in law could be made more aware of the limi-
tations tacitly built into the very framework of the language in which they work.
As we have seen, an empirically informed perspective helps to problematize the
process of legal translation itself, challenging complacent presumptions regarding
the transparent character of legal language. Like all human language, legal language
is embedded in a particular setting, shaped by the social context and institution
surrounding it. Systematic study of this contextual molding provides an impor-
tant antidote to the hubris that inheres in standard legal metalinguistic assump-
tions and pushes legal professionals to remember the limits of their knowledge.
Excellent translation, whether across disciplines or among people, begins with
epistemological modesty; it is only when we recognize that there are other pos-
sible perspectives and frameworks that we can start to comprehend them.
68
 The
arrogance that accompanies a closed linguistic system can contribute to the alien-
ation of lawyers and the legal system from the people they are supposed to serve,
because it can prevent those speaking the language of law from truly hearing alter-
native perspectives.
69
 This study has laid out some of the basic metalinguistic struc-
tures that render legal language at once powerful and problematic. Understanding
the problems alongside the power might help law students balance the intoxicat-
ing appeal of their new language with a realistic reminder of its limitations.

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