The Language of Law School This page intentionally left blank

Transcript 3.3 [1/5/33]
33
Prof.:
Okay, uhh, are oral contracts enforceable?
34
Student:
Yes.
35
Prof.:
All right. Do you have an example of that?
36
Student:
[[silence (.04)]]
37
Prof.:
The helicopter case, wasn’t that an oral contract?
38
Student:
Yes, it was.
Turn 36 is an entirely silent turn. If we think of turns as composed of speech,
then this is an odd coding decision. However, the logic of the conversation makes
clear that this space in the speech belonged to the student, and the professor’s
subsequent turn responds to the silence as clearly as it might have responded to
a spoken answer.
19
 Again, we could choose to simply omit this kind of turn, but
then we would miss an important phenomenon in these classrooms: the no-
answer response to professorial questioning. Distinct codes under the coding cate-
gory “kind of turn” distinguished nonverbal and silent turns from spoken turns,
so that we could, for purposes of some analyses, remove all silent turns.
A law student from abroad once told me that she found mastery of turn-taking
to be one of the most difficult aspects of language learning when she came to the
United States. It was far easier to pick up the vocabulary—and to learn how to string
this vocabulary together into intelligible utterances—than it was to figure out when
another speaker was really finished talking and an acceptable moment for begin-
ning one’s own speech had arrived. This skill turned out to be, as several genera-
tions of conversation analysts could have told her, essential to participating in
communicative interaction in a way that permitted mutual comprehension and
also social connection. Thus, we see how complex and difficult it is to pin down
the nuances of the back-and-forth of conversation—and how important it is to
undertake that task, despite the challenges involved.
Project Profile
The entire population of students in the eight classrooms of the study was 705. Of
this group, 41.8% were female and 15.9% were students of color. In 6 (75%) of the
classrooms, men outnumbered women. In individual classes, percentages of stu-
dents of color ranged from a high of 46.9 (school 8) to a low of 6.6 (school 3). Table
3.1 provides a basis for comparing these figures with national statistics. The stu-
dent sample profile is close to national averages in terms of gender distributions
and in terms of percentage of African American students; it is slightly lower than
the national average in terms of percentage of Latino/a students and slightly higher
than the average in terms of Asian American students.
In terms of professors, this sample was purposely high in diversity, as is evidenced
by the comparison with national averages in Table 3.2. There are indications that
the national statistics for full-time faculty are likely to include more professors of
color and white female professors than are first-year teaching faculties. Thus, the

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38
Introduction
overrepresentation of female and minority professors in my study is still stronger than
even the above comparison would indicate.
20
 For this reason, I do not present aggre-
gate figures for the data set as a whole, because to the degree that professor race and/
or gender affects classroom dynamics, aggregate figures from this data set are likely
to be misleading. However, in Chapter 7, I provide profiles for classrooms of various
types to give a background for qualitative assessments of the impact of various char-
acteristics of the students, teachers, and overall classroom interactions on the teach-
ing in those classes. The study includes three classes from the elite/prestige categories
of law schools, two from regional schools, and three from local law schools.
table
 3.1
Student Race and Gender Distribution Comparison
of Study Sample with National Averages
National Statistics on First-Year
Total Study Sample
 Law Students: 1990–91
1
Women
41.8%
42.6%
Men
58.2%
57.4%
African
6.2%
7.2%
American
Asian
6.1%
4.6%
American
Latino/a
2.7%
4.8%
American
Other*
0.8%
Total
Minority
15.9%
17.2%
*Other includes Native American, Arab American, Pacific Islander students,
and otherwise not specified students of color.
1. American Bar Association,