The Language of Law School This page intentionally left blank

[School 2: Elite/Prestige]
Student 1: I think I expected to spend more time on the “whys” of law 
[ . . . ]
 and
that was surprising to me, how much time we actually spent explaining
and finding out the details of the doctrine rather than talking about the
justifications for the doctrine. 
[ . . . ]
 When I was looking into law
schools, I specifically wanted to go to a school that would be more
theory-oriented and I was told that this school would be one of those
schools and just seems to vary from professor to professor.
[School 7: Regional/State]
Student 2:
Well, contracts, I mean, 
[ . . . ]
 there’s a whole- the whole history of
capitalism underlying it.
The students in the group from the regional law school went on to discuss in ani-
mated fashion the policy and social assumptions behind particular doctrines in
contract law and the evolution of contract law from its initial basic assumptions,
concluding that “the law kind of reflects how society is.” These students certainly
seemed no less entranced with (or capable of engaging with) the bigger picture
behind doctrine than did their more elite counterparts. It is certainly true that
students from less elite schools more frequently praised professors for remind-
ing them of what things would actually look like in practice, and one would not
want to deny some average differences among the students in terms of their
emphasis on theory versus practice. But these seem to be muted in the first-year
curriculum, where even the most elite students have to descend to the level of
doctrine when learning how to read cases, and where many professors across all
kinds of schools take time here and there to pull in the bigger picture of theory
and policy.
As we saw in our initial excerpt, the shadow of popular cultural pictures of
law school still looms large in the accounts of first-year law students, with a num-
ber of the interviewees making spontaneous comments about the frightening

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Difference
image of Kingsfield or expectations based on 
The Paper Chase
 or 
One L
 looming
over them. Although the expectations may themselves have created tension
for the students in the initial days of class, they generally commented with relief
on how unlike this picture their actual law school experience has turned out
to be. One group of students remarked with humor on the cooperative stance
they feel their professor takes when he senses that he has moved too quickly for
them:
[7–11]
Student 1:
Sometimes, I don’t know what it is, but like, he’ll come in 
[ . . . ]
 he’ll
just go, go, go, go, you know, and then it’s all finally over everybody’s
head; he’ll come in the next day and realize that everything went over
our heads and he’ll go back over it.
Student 2:
See, we sit at the back 
[ . . . ]
 we sit in the back and we have a theory
that he comes in the next day and everybody’s just staring at him and
sees all this sea of blank faces and realizes that it’s time to slow down
and go back over things. 
[ . . . ]
[omitted material]
Student 1: () dumb look on their faces () 
[ . . . ]
 (like) a cow looking at a train.
[[laughter]] You ever see a cow look at a train, they’re probably trying
to figure out what the hell it is, you know, what is this thing?
Here the image of collaboration between professor and student reaches a very sym-
pathetic level, as the students hypothesize that their teacher can read the sea of blank
faces, gazing at him with cow-like expressions, and then adjust his teaching.
Students differentiate between the teaching style of the Socratic method as
represented in popular culture (which they report as a relative rarity in their own
schools now) and the Socratic teaching they more usually encounter in their
classes. On the one hand, some students expressed disapproval of a “hide-the-
ball” style of teaching in which professors convey a sense of superiority based on
knowing more than the students, in which “you are going to feel stupid as dirt
because it’s rigged, because the professor taught it ten to twenty years and they
know the questions and you don’t.