The Language of Law School This page intentionally left blank

Transcript 4.1 [7/1/1]
Prof.:
Okay. I thought I’d start telling you how I used to start the course of
contracts. I used to wait about five minutes after an hour just to start. And
then, () the students were wondering if they were in the right place,
everyone’s afraid to ask (). So, I’d come storm to the front of the room,
slam books down on the desk, and shout out, “The course is Contracts and
the name’s Kingsfield!”
Class:
[[laughter]]
Prof.:
Well, I didn’t do that this year. I don’t feeling like slamming anything this
year, uh, besides that, a couple of years ago I almost lost three people in
the second row to cardiac arrest.
Class:
[[laughter]]
From the ideology of law school pedagogy there emerges a stereotypic image of
the Socratic method as a highly stylized teaching genre, depicted vividly in the ex-
cerpt from the popular book 
One L
 that was quoted at the beginning of this chap-
ter.
22
 Although, as Transcript 4.1 attests, this cultural stereotype still casts a shadow
in today’s law school classrooms, the degree to which the popular image mirrors actual
practice is to date largely unstudied.
23
 Some aspects of the broader structure of many
of the classes in this study are aptly captured by the stereotype of law school teaching
that is described in legal academics’ as well as popular accounts. Professors frequently
begin class by calling on a student, who may then be expected to participate in dia-
logue with the professor for as long as an entire class period. Typically, the professor
questions the student about aspects of legal cases assigned for class that day, with

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Learning to Read Like a Lawyer
51
often painstaking attention to linguistic details. Although the answers that a student
gives may lead the conversation in unexpected directions, this can happen only if
the professor chooses to incorporate students’ answers in his or her subsequent dis-
cussion. Thus, even potentially creative aspects of the exchange are carefully chan-
neled and controlled.
In their work on graduate school education in France, Bourdieu and Passeron
noted a number of ways in which the formal European lecture method enforced
professorial authority:
The lecturer finds in the particularities of the space which the traditional institu-
tion arranges for him (the platform, the professorial chair at the focal point on which
all gazes converge) material and symbolic conditions which enable him to keep the
students at a respectful distance. . . . Elevated and enclosed in the space which
crowns him orator, . . . the professor is condemned to a theatrical monologue and
virtuoso exhibition by a necessity of position far more coercive than the most im-
perious regulations.
24
The discipline of the law school classroom, with regulations that require more than
respectful distance and silence, can in a sense be seen as still more authoritarian.
Duncan Kennedy describes this discipline as a loss of autonomy, for although
students have freedom to drift away from the professor’s message during a lec-
ture, if they so choose, law students must always be ready to be called on and to
perform in front of the large audience that is their law school cohort.
25
 This
emphasis on performance—on discipline to perform rather than just listen—
contributes to professorial authority in a new way. For if, as Bourdieu and
Passeron would have it, the college professor in lecturing imparts “the Word”
much as a religious figure would, the law school professor requires students to
divine and repeat back the Word as revealed to students through submission to
the flow of professorial questioning.
This method requires students to remain in conversation with the professor,
while never modifying the demand that they conform to certain stylistic require-
ments. This is one important way that the imposition of discourse style in a law
classroom setting imparts a quite different message about power than is discernable
in the working-class and so-called low-ability classrooms studied by scholars like
Collins and Gee. For in law school, students are often forced to assume the new
style; they are not generally permitted to give up, as the African American child of
the Gee study was.
26
 In one sense, the power imposed in the law school classroom
is more authoritarian; yet, it is empowering also, in the sense that students are often
not allowed to disengage without at least making a good attempt to respond. In
this sense, they are pushed to remain in and master the dialogue. The law school
professor is thus at once giving students no choice and telling them that they are
capable of performing this genre.