The Language of Law School This page intentionally left blank

 [ . . . ]
 and so you go through these ordinary things
that virtually every law school class in contracts must go through 
[ . . . ]
 on offer,
acceptance, consideration, promissory estoppel, etcetera, etcetera. 
[ . . . ]
” The
excitement that the professors felt about conveying this kind of knowledge was
palpable across the interviews; as one local law school professor explained, “I adore

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170
Difference
teaching my students 
[ . . . ]
 I think the subject is fabulous. I think it’s fabulous
because
 [ . . . ]
 of the significance of contract as, um, one of the basic social struc-
tures of everybody’s lives 
[ . . . ]
” (Interview 3). This precise sentiment was echoed
by one of the elite law school professors in her interview as well. Indeed, in many
cases, professors would proceed at points in their interviews to launch enthusias-
tically into explanations of specific aspects of contract law doctrine pertinent to
the discussion. In this sense, the language and logic of the case law assigned to the
students, and of contract law in particular, shared center stage for these teachers
across all of the schools of the study, both in terms of their own self-representa-
tions and in terms of the discussions in their classes.
Another interesting similarity that we have seen among the classes is the pres-
ence of a kind of backbone of dialogic structure, even in classes occupied mostly
by professor lecture. Whether in this latter case, or in the case of the short-exchange
classes, or in the modified Socratic classes, we could outline most of the classes using
a pair-part structure, one that only very rarely (predominantly in the more con-
versational short-exchange classes) gives way to any alternative discursive format.
And although this pair-part structure occasionally instantiates something resem-
bling a monologue, we have also seen the ubiquity of multivoiced exchanges in these
classrooms—frequently dialogues, often posed as an exchange between opposing
voices. We could analyze the metalinguistic ideology conveyed and encoded by the
ubiquity of dialogic structure in a number of ways. First, like the semantic content
of many class discussions, which is often organized around exploring two oppos-
ing arguments, this discursive structure conveys a sense of legal reasoning as fun-
damentally dialogic: the thought, mirrored precisely in the discourse, emerges from
a constant conversation between two distinct positions. Professors convey this even
in lectures, as they first pose and then answer questions and as they question the
case first from one point of view and then another. In a functionalist mode, one
could point to the fit between this and a number of discursive features of legal
practice, most notably the question-answer structure used with witnesses in court,
by judges in dealing with attorneys both in appellate oral argument and elsewhere,
and even by attorneys when dealing with clients. Written legal opinions, which
attorneys must be able to parse, generally encompass and discuss two or more dif-
fering stances both toward the events in question and the law to be applied, often
posing one against the other in the course of explicating the court’s decision. In
this study, I have also suggested a more profound metalinguistic message conveyed
by this focus on textual and linguistic structures: an unmooring of fixed norma-
tive stances in favor of this discursively based fluidity, which focuses on linguistic
authority and argument.
If the classes shared an emphasis on legal doctrine, with some differentiation
around the edges in terms of how much time is spent discussing theoretical issues,
then we can ask whether there are any other possible points of differentiation among
teachers based on school status. Although the classes all share some kind of back-
bone of dialogic or at least dialectical structuring, we have also seen that there are
some considerable differences among them in terms of overall discourse structure.
One possibility is that they differ by school status along lines of discourse style,
with perhaps classes in the higher-ranked schools staying closer to the traditional

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Professorial Style in Context
171
Socratic style of teaching.
39
 Table 7.1 summarizes the discourse profiles. These
quantitative profiles include the total percentage of time taken by professor, indi-
vidual students, and the class as a whole. They also break down the percentage of
classroom discussion (in terms of both time and turns) spent in lecture (mono-
logue), more lengthy (“focused”) Socratic-style dialogue, and other kinds of
interaction.
The classes are ordered in Table 7.1 in terms of their location in the status
hierarchy often employed in distinguishing among law schools.
40
 Classes #2, #8,
and #5 are in law schools ranked in the elite or prestige categories. Classes #4 and
#7 are in schools that would be described as regional. And Classes #1, #6, and #3
are in local law schools, including one night school class.
We can see immediately that there is no one-to-one correlation between school
status and use of more Socratic styles of teaching; the three most Socratic class-
rooms (#5, #4, #1) are in an elite/prestige, a regional, and a local law school, re-
spectively, thus, spanning the entire status hierarchy. These three professors do have
something in common, however; they are all white male teachers who were trained
at elite law schools. They differ in other respects; in terms of teaching experience,
one had been teaching 16 to 20 years at the time of the study, another 11 to 15
years, and a third from 1 to 5 years. This last teacher was also younger than the
other two (31–35 years old as opposed to 46–50 years old).
41
 Thus, the category of
modified Socratic teachers includes our youngest and least experienced professor
as well as our oldest and most experienced. In the middle range, with 28% and 29%
of time spent in extended dialogue, were the two professors of color in the study,
who both had been trained at elite/prestige law schools and were teaching in elite/
prestige law schools. Included in the lowest Socratic range, using only 21% to 24%
of class time for extended dialogue, were two white female professors who had
trained in local or regional law schools and were teaching in local law schools. One
of these, Class #6, was the most egalitarian classroom in the study in terms of par-
ticipation patterns. Finally, at the lowest end of the extended-dialogue range was
Class #7 (with predominantly lecture); this white male professor had trained at a
regional law school and was teaching in a regional law school.
We cannot draw any broad conclusions from so small a sample. But we can
pause to note a similarity between the hint of a pattern found among these teach-
ers and that noted by Conley and O’Barr in their (similarly small) sample of small
claims court judges.
42
 In that study, the authors identified two distinct kinds of
“voices,” one focused on rules and the other on relationships. These voices were
correlated with distinct speech styles (“powerful” versus “powerless”) and differ-
ing ideological understandings of the law (law as “limitation” versus “enablement”).
Interestingly, the judges who most closely followed the rule-based, formalist ap-
proaches (“authoritative decisionmakers” and “proceduralists”) were all white men
with formal legal training. On the other hand, the judges who used the most rela-
tional, flexible approaches (“mediators” and “lawmakers”) were all women (one
African American, the others European American). There was also a category of
“strict adherents,” who saw the law as beyond their control and simply attempted
to apply it strictly (in this category were an African American man and a European
American woman). All of the judges who lacked formal legal training fell into the

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172
Difference
table
 7.1
Classroom Discourse Profiles
Percentage of Overall
Class Time
Percentage of Dialogue* (Time)
Percentage of Dialogue* (Turns)
Focused
Focused
Class
Teacher
Student
Class
Monologue
Dialogue
Other
Monologue
Dialogue
Other