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[ . . . ]
There is a deep emotional fulfillment that you are supposed to be getting from the
law school. That is why you came here.
As we noted, this exchange highlights the process by which students are encour-
aged to separate their inner opinions and feelings from the discursively defined
legal personae they are learning to embody. A core facet of this embodiment, of
course, is the shift to a new voice, so that students engaging in dialogue with their
teachers begin to speak as players in a legal drama. In the process, they move away
from emotion, morality, and context as they create new selves anchored in legal
discourse. This makes sense of the otherwise nonsensical situation we find in this
exchange, where the professor can actually situate himself as more expert regard-
ing the student’s own motives than she herself is.
Let us now compare that law school dialogue with the following exchange
reported by Philips in her study of courtroom discourse:
Philips text:
49
Judge:
(Show) the defendant in custody. Uh as I informed you gentle-
men in chambers, I have reviewed the uh defendant’s record and
I cannot go along with the plea agreement with you. If I were to
136
Similarity
sentence him I would sentence him to the (uh) state prison and
certainly give him more than time served. The plea agreement
provides that the defendant may withdraw his plea uh.
Defendant:
I don’t wanna withdraw my plea.
Judge:
All right (let) the record show that the defendant has withdrawn
his plea and the court orders that the matter be set for trial um –
Defendant :
I don’t wanna withdraw my plea! {louder than last time; basically
a shout; he shouts the rest of the time}
Judge:
You don’t wanna withd/raw your plea?/
Defense lawyer:
/Be quiet/ please. [2 secs.] Your
Honor, I would request that you withdraw his plea. If my client
doesn’t want to, I don’t know what I can do about it.
The ensuing exchange features the defendant continuing to try to describe the
conditions under which he has been detained, stressing that he wants some imme-
diate relief from “twenty-four hour lockup . . . in a little cell this big.” The judge
and attorneys continue to proceed with the dialogue needed to prepare for trial,
ignoring this commentary. At one point the judge states that he is ordering a Rule
11 examination, to which the defendant replies:
Defendant:
I’m not taking no Rule 11.
Judge:
Who do you want?
Defense lawyer: Your Honor, Dr. Madigan.
Defendant:
Fuck this shit.
Eventually the defendant tried to hobble out of the courtroom (for a second time).
How do we make sense of the judge’s comment “Let the record show that the
defendant has withdrawn his plea” immediately following a turn in which the de-
fendant has quite clearly indicated that he does not want to do so? Again we see
the primacy of the demands of legally defined dialogic position; regardless of what
the defendant wants, the judge (the authoritative voice of the law in this setting) is
going to withdraw the plea. He does not hesitate to provide the correct response
for this defendant when the defendant refuses to; putting fictional speech into the
mouth of one’s interlocutor is an important part of discursive practice in some legal
settings. The student in the law school exchange is uncooperative in the process,
perhaps in part because she is taken aback by this direct a usurpation of her voice,
and perhaps because she simply can’t divine what the professor is seeking. This
creates a problem, however, which the professor eventually solves not by explain-
ing the point he wanted to make, but by speaking for the student. The prisoner
also creates a problem when he will not provide the requested locution, will not
occupy the position required by the ongoing dialogue; this is not supposed to be
quite as easily solved in a criminal law setting. However, the judge and attorneys
do override his protests; his own attorney takes his place in the dialogue (despite
the defendant’s obvious opposition to allowing his voice to be represented in this
way). In both cases, the speaking “I” forged by legal discourse for each person is
clearly not their own: it is that of a new persona, carved and crafted by the demands
of legal discourse.
On Becoming a Legal Person
137
Notice that, once again, a defining moment in legal discourse and legal legiti-
macy requires the unmooring of the self from its usual coordinates, a fluidity of
voice and footing and position.
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A deceptive metapragmatic ideology locates jus-
tice and even-handedness in this unmooring, in this constructed dialogue that at
once anchors and conceals legal hegemony. Layers of intertextual reference pro-
vide a new anchoring that furthers this process.
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As Conley and O’Barr have noted,
“the details of legal discourse matter,” because it is in and through them that the
larger contours of the system of justice are constructed.
52
Conley and O’Barr urge
us to bring together a bigger picture generated by sociological analyses of law with
the on-the-ground understanding achieved by fine-grained study of legal language.
In these chapters, we have seen the importance of such a marriage to grasping the
message and import of legal pedagogy as it shapes incipient legal practitioners’
worldviews.
Having explored aspects of language structure and ideology that are shared
among the classrooms of the study, we now turn to examine differences and
variability.
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