The Language of Law School This page intentionally left blank

Review of Legal Education
.
table
 3.2
Faculty Race and Gender Distribution Comparison
of Study Sample with National Averages
National Statistics: 1994
1
Total Study Sample
Full-time
Full- and Part-time
Women
37.5%
26.0%
35.3%
Men
62.5%
74.0%
64.7%
Minority
25.0%
12.0%
13.9%
Note an alternative statistic: in six of the top-tier schools, women taught fewer
than 20% of the first-year courses.
2
1. American Bar Association, 
Review of Legal Education
.
2. American Bar Association, 
Unfinished Business
.

---

Study Design, Methodology, and Profile
39
Summary
In sum, this study combines multiple methods in assessing the first-year law school
classroom experience. The set of classrooms studied contains more diversity in race
and gender of professors than is found in the average first-year law school class-
room and spans the range of law school status rankings. We turn now to examine
similarities that bridge these diverse classrooms.

---

This page intentionally left blank 

---

II
.
.
SIMILARITY: LEGAL EPISTEMOLOGY
Therefore it appears that the kind of reasoning involved in the
legal process is one in which the classification changes as the
classification is made. The rules change as the rules are applied.
More important, the rules arise out of a process which, while
comparing fact situations, creates the rules and then applies
them.
1
The task . . . then, is not to discard rights but to see through or
past them so that they reflect a larger definition of privacy and
property: so that privacy is turned from exclusion based on self-
regard into regard for another’s fragile, mysterious autonomy;
and so that property regains its ancient connotation of being a
reflection of the universal self.
2
I
n this section we trace the common thread that binds the quite divergent class-
rooms of this study together, an underlying approach or worldview that I call
U.S. legal epistemology. In Chapter 4 we examine the shared underlying approach
to reading (i.e., to written texts and their contexts) that is conveyed in first-year
law school training across otherwise diverse classrooms. We begin with a close study
of the discourse for which law school is famous: classic Socratic method teaching.
We ask: In its most highly structured form, what does this discourse style “do,”
how does it teach? This analysis reveals some core metalinguistic traits of legal
epistemology, traits that are encoded in Socratic pedagogy. The chapter moves on
to demonstrate that, throughout the classrooms of this study (all of which vary to
some degree from the most rigid form of Socratic teaching), there is still an ap-
proach that shares many of the underlying tenets of the classic Socratic method,
conveying the same core metalinguistic features through a variety of discursive
styles. Thus, in the second half of Chapter 4, we trace these features as they emerge
in the universally shared “internal” categories of a legal reading: the labels that

---

42
Similarity
natives to the system themselves use in describing the genre, such as “facts,” “law,”
and “policy arguments.” Learning to think like a lawyer, I suggest, is in large part
a function of learning to read, talk, and write like a lawyer; all this involves a dis-
tinctive approach to written texts and textual interpretation.
Having examined this distinctive approach exhaustively in Chapter 4, in Chap-
ter 5 we focus more explicitly on the divergent teaching styles found among the
classrooms of this study. Here we examine the variety of ways that a similar mes-
sage about legal language is conveyed in today’s law school classroom, ranging from
a class dominated by lecturing to modified Socratic teaching to a style character-
ized by shorter student-professor exchanges. This gives us an opportunity to ex-
amine the nuances of discourse structure across different classes. Although surface
features of classroom discourse differ among these classrooms, we find some in-
teresting resonances in other structural features of classroom language. These reso-
nances provide subtle structural support for the underlying message about legal
epistemology (and accompanying metalinguistic orientations) that is being con-
veyed to students.
Finally, in Chapter 6, we consider what kind of person is created through the
talk of the law school classroom, and along with this we ask about the larger view
of the world, of human selves and motivations, and of social context that are en-
tailed in this creation. Chapter 6 concludes by considering the broader social im-
plications of the underlying legal epistemology outlined in the chapters of Part II.
Here I turn to contemporary social theory to draw connections between U.S. legal
language and the wider social system in which it is embedded.

---

Learning to Read Like a Lawyer
43
4
.
.
43
Learning to Read Like a Lawyer: Text,
Context, and Linguistic Ideology