The Language of Law School This page intentionally left blank

particular, he notes that labor has both an abstract and a concrete character in
capitalist societies. Labor has a concrete character because, for society to survive,
some kinds of work must be physically performed. However, in capitalist societ-
ies, concrete labor is mediated by an abstract level in which “individuals are com-
pelled to produce and exchange commodities in order to survive.”
41
 Postone calls
this “abstract labor.”
42
 This new kind of social mediation is “impersonal, abstract,
and objective.”
43
 It creates a form of domination and alienation that is quite dif-
ferent from those found in other kinds of societies. However, this does not mean
that capitalism is necessarily worse than other, previous social forms, which em-
ployed other kinds of domination. For example, in feudal society, precisely because
labor was not taken away in such an impersonal and abstract way, Postone argues
that “expropriation . . . [by the elite, nonlaboring classes] was 
and had to be
 based
[more] upon direct compulsion.”
44
 The move to abstraction in capitalist society
therefore carries both a liberating potential and increased opportunity for conceal-
ing the alienation of concrete labor through an illusion of freedom.
Although we must proceed cautiously in drawing parallels at this broad level
of social analysis, it is interesting that the legal language taught in the United States
also has a double edge. On the one hand, the approach to legal reading found in
law school classrooms offers students a potentially liberating opportunity to step
into an impersonal, abstract, and objective approach to human conflict. On the
other hand, erasing (or marginalizing) many of the concrete social and contextual

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134
Similarity
features of these conflicts can direct attention away from grounded moral under-
standings, which some critics believe are crucial to achieving justice. Moreover,
this step out of social context and emotion provides the law with a cloak of appar-
ent neutrality, which can conceal the ways that law participates in and supports
unjust aspects of capitalist societies. This approach also gives the appearance of
dealing with concrete and specific aspects of each conflict, thereby hiding the ways
that legal approaches exclude from systematic consideration the very details and
contexts that many would deem important for making just moral assessments.
As a result, the alienation experienced by some law students during legal train-
ing may be an unavoidable consequence of a process in which increasingly instru-
mental and technical appeals to legal authority blunt moral and context-sensitive
judgment. Such technical appeals lie at the heart of U.S. legal epistemology and
are an important part of the legal system’s very legitimacy. As we have seen, the
people and landscapes that result from this new legal approach to reading and
composing conflict stories are defined by their positions in legal arguments, con-
stituted in and through dialogue. Taking a step back from any emotional response,
the legal reader uses question-answer pair-parts to create a discursive distance that
nonetheless allows him or her to simultaneously actually enter into the conflict as
well, standing in the shoes of the people involved. Just as legal translation into
putatively objective categories gives the legal system a veneer of legitimacy, the
ability to take either position in this ongoing dialogue also conveys a sense of ob-
jectivity and fairness. All points of view are ostensibly under consideration; all sides
of the conflict will be given voice. In this sense, role-playing and question-answer
dialogic form are features of the metapragmatic regimentation of discourse that
takes institutionalized ideology to the heart of the speaking that constitutes the legal
arena. As Matoesian
45
 has noted, domination is well concealed and indeed natu-
ralized through metalinguistic ideology and structure in legal settings, and the law
school classroom offers a prism through which to see this process in action.
In her study of the language of judges, as we’ve already noted, linguistic an-
thropologist Susan Philips also stresses the role of legal discourse in naturalizing
and concealing the enactment of politics and power in court:
The judges in this study are conscious to varying degrees of the ideological dualisms
and oppositions identified in legal, political, and everyday control ideologies. But it
is striking that ideology and conflict are most acknowledged where they are consid-
ered peripheral. Ideological conflict is displaced from the political and legal into the
everyday “nonlegal” discussion of courtroom control in a way that furthers the im-
age of the law as ideologically monolithic.
46
There is an obvious parallel here to the way professors acknowledge the potential
impact of racism or politics on legal decisions, but push it to the margins of discourse.
Philips also demonstrates that judges vary systematically, by political orientation, in
how they approach hearing guilty pleas. However, they characterize what they do in
the courtroom as above politics, as legal and professional: “Judges in fact repudiate
the enactment of political ideology in their courtroom behavior.”
47
 Politics are at once
enacted in the metalinguistic structure of courtroom discourse and concealed through
the fiction that this discourse is “legal” rather than “political.”

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On Becoming a Legal Person
135
As we have seen, the putative safeguard provided by legal discursive structure
relies on a metalinguistic filter. This filter has a number of dimensions: the charac-
teristic layering of legal texts and legal authority,
48
 translation into doctrinal cat-
egories, the metapragmatic warrants provided by legal procedure, the insistent
shifting between positions in an oppositional dialogue, the distancing provided by
ongoing technical questioning. To successfully master this discourse, students must
be able to speak in an “I” that is not their own self, to adapt their position to the
exigencies of legal language. Arguably, most professionals must do this, yet the flu-
idity of footing and role taught in law school classrooms stands out as more simi-
lar to, say, acting school than to medical school. In both law and theater, the fluidity
of footing and role, submerging self into the discourse itself, are central to a new
chameleon professional “I.” It is not just one new professional self that must be
learned and voiced; rather, there is an ongoing multiplicity of perspectives and
voices (although they are bound together by a common metapragmatic founda-
tion). Of course, in law school, the act of submersion in multiple voices is part of
a linguistic process by which state power interacts with individual citizens’ lives,
giving it a different character from training in, for example, theater.
Law students, then, are undergoing a quiet process in which their very selves
are decentered through and in speech, as they take on the voices and perspectives
pushed on them by the demands of legal discourse. A poignant comparison can be
made between this process in law school training and discourse in courtrooms.
Recall for a moment the exchange in Transcript 6.25, in which the professor cor-
rects a student’s attempt to describe her own motivations for attending law school:
Come, Ms. C., you’re not that shallow a person. Let’s be honest. Let’s force you to say
something maybe you don’t really mean. Let’s psychoanalyze you. You’re in law school
rather than business school because you find it at bottom more deeply satisfying or
at least you thought you could, to study the law than to go to business school.