The Language of Law School This page intentionally left blank

Virtuous Citizens.
4. Early legal realism cast doubt on the conventional legal conception that “a decision
of any lawsuit results from the application of a legal rule or rules to the facts of the suit.”
Frank,
Law and the Modern Mind
, xii. Realists were also concerned about the way law worked
in people’s lives apart from formal court decisions. See, e.g., U. Moore and Callahan, “Law
and Learning Theory.” The social scientists who took up the challenge left by the legal real-
ists in the past two decades formed the field of law-and-society scholarship, which brings
together many different disciplines in the study of the real-world effects of law. See, e.g., Abel,
Law & Society Reader
; Lempert and Sanders, 
Invitation
; Macaulay et al., 
Law & Society
.
5. See Pound, “Law in Books and Law in Action”; see also Llewellyn’s famous list of
“common points of departure” for “real realists,” which includes a “distrust of traditional
legal rules and concepts in so far as they purport to 
describe
 what either courts or people
are actually doing” and “a distrust of the theory that traditional prescriptive rule-formu-
lations are 
the
 heavily operative factor in producing court decisions.” Llewellyn, “Some
Realism about Realism,” 1222. This distinction in legal discussions has interesting paral-
lels with a wider cultural distinction between “book” learning and “practical” learning,
which might be fruitfully explored.
6. This is an insight that is by no means original to me; the legal realists themselves and
many scholars following in their footsteps since have taken formal legal doctrine seriously,
of course without assuming that the formal framework in any way captures the full picture
of what happens in the translation of formal doctrine to practice. See, e.g., Llewellyn, “On
Warranty of Quality”; Scheppele, 
Legal Secrets.
 Law-and–social science scholars have also
taken quite seriously the study of legal experts and have looked carefully at how their expe-
rience shapes the practice of law. See, e.g., Abel,
 American Lawyers
; Abel and Lewis, 
Lawyers
in Society
 I, II, III; Nelson et al., 
Lawyers’ Ideals
; Sarat and Felstiner, 
Divorce Lawyers
. For an
examination of the gendered dimensions of legal epistemology in action among practicing
attorneys, paralegals, and legal secretaries, see Pierce, 
Gender Trials
.
A similar debate about the place of expert knowledge in the understanding of social
institutions can be found among scholars (especially anthropologists) studying religion.
Notes to Page 13
227

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Although anthropologists are predictably concerned about the way people on the street
understand their religion (see, e.g., Jean Comaroff, 
Body of Power
), they also have tradi-
tionally devoted some time to understanding how religious experts interpret and under-
stand religious symbolism. See, e.g., Reichel-Dolmatoff, 
Amazonian Cosmos
. Silverstein
notes that “institutions with procedural formalism, e.g., religion, law, etc., are particularly
prone to ‘expert/lay’ divergences” in perspective between those controlling the institutions
and those otherwise inhabiting them. Silverstein, personal communication, 10/11/05.
7. Ronald Dworkin makes a similar point when he urges that we pay attention to
professional ideologies, which he terms the “internal, participants’ point of view,” in un-
derstanding law, pointing to law as an “argumentative” practice. Dworkin, 
Law’s Empire
13–14.
8. Sociolegal scholars studying legal practitioners have turned up many examples of
informal ideologies and views of the legal profession. See, e.g., Conley and O’Barr,