The Language of Law School This page intentionally left blank

From Expectation to Experience
, 178.
45. Id., 179.
46. J. B. White, 
Justice as Translation
, 3–21. J. B. White’s ambitious conception of
interdisciplinary translation would require those bridging the boundaries between disci-
plines to put themselves in the shoes of practitioners of each field: to hold in mind the
actual discourses and ways of approaching the world that characterize each discipline. This
requires a far more profound understanding than can be provided by a quick reading of
the results of someone’s paper or book, or even the adoption of a method from another
field. Providing a somewhat less optimistic view, Wayne Booth cedes this kind of “inter-
nal” understanding to the experts in a field (he calls this “Rhetoric 1”) but hopes that we
can nonetheless communicate across disciplines in a more indirect fashion, through a sense
that there are colleagues whose expertise we trust though we don’t completely understand
it (“Rhetoric 2”) and through sharing a general framework for assessing scholarship that
allows us to judge others’ arguments as apparently coherent, as reflecting intellectual en-
gagement, and so forth. Booth, 
The Vocation of a Teacher
, 311–327.
47. Dorf, “Foreword,” 38.
48. For a striking contrast, see Hirsch’s description of her approach to initiating
undergraduate students into the perspectives and language of anthropology. Hirsch, “Mak-
ing Culture Visible.”
49. Silverstein, “Translation, Transduction, Transformation,” 91–95. Silverstein
would reserve the word “translation” for the most transparent end of the spectrum, where
language most closely approximates “European ideological construals of it” as primar-
ily denotational. Id., 75. Once we move into the realm of indexical meaning, Silverstein
would either talk about “transduction” (in which we attempt to “find a way to index
something comparable” in one language using another) or “transformation” (where we
shift “source material contextualized in specific ways into configurations of cultural
semiosis of a sort substantially or completely different from those one has started with”).
Id., 88, 91. In other words, Silverstein would not use the word “translation” at any point
in this volume to describe the processes I am discussing. Because I am concerned with
actually communicating (“transducing”?) the insights of linguistic anthropology (includ-
ing Silverstein’s) in a way that is comprehensible to legal and other scholars, I am in the
ironic position of declining to use Silverstein’s proposed terminology in an effort to better
convey some of the basic insights of his field. For those familiar with his terminology,
however, let me just add here that I am in effect attempting to urge those using legal
language to become aware of the inevitable transformation involved in the imposition
of legal frames across diverse social arenas, and to encourage something that more closely
resembles transduction when legal scholars and social scientists enter into conversation
with one another.
50. I have elsewhere noted the possibility that legal discourse can begin to shift to a
more complex, contextual approach through attention to its own margins; in the legal
academy, this would include legal writing classes and clinical instruction. Mertz, “Teach-
ing Lawyers the Language of Law.” Rakoff suggests another possible route, using the cate-
gories of “embedded” and “nonembedded” perspectives to suggest that legal thinking can
both be embedded in a rich consideration of “cases, statutes, and the like” yet also be “theo-
retically rich and, still further, sophisticated in its use of the methods of other disciplines.”
Rakoff, “Law, Knowledge,” 1281.
Notes to Pages 218–220
273

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51. Burns,