The Language of Law School This page intentionally left blank

Divorce Lawyers and Their Clients
, Sarat and Felstiner demon-
strate that divorce lawyers commonly urge their clients to separate off parts of themselves,
distancing from emotion in order to concentrate on forming a self that thinks effectively
in legal terms. As we will see, law professors urge a similar separation on their students,
pushing them toward a self defined in terms of legal-discursive positioning. See Mehan,
“The Construction of an LD Student,” 274, for discussion of a broadly defined distinction
between the removed stance of professionals and the more local, contextual construction
of self found in everyday discourse. I locate the abstract self of law school and legal dis-
course within this broad professional category, but I also point to distinctive features of
the abstract individual who emerges in and through legal language.
42. Footing will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6. The concept is adapted from
the work of Erving Goffman, who distinguished different possible kinds of positions people
could hold in producing speech. For example, the person who speaks an utterance is the
“animator,” while someone who composed the words spoken is the “author.”
Silverstein would characterize the original Socratic dialogues as in fact a form of “dia-
lectic monologue” in which a single voice in the Bakhtinian sense is presented through
the literary device of adjacency-pair structures, (A
1
;B
1
);(A
2
;B
2
); . . . for speakers A and B
(personal communication, 9/23/05). We see the closest approximations to this in the more
canonical Socratic classrooms of this study, but only when things are going relatively
smoothly. (See Transcripts 4.2 and 4.3, for some rather mixed examples from one of the
pilot study classes, which used the most strictly Socratic style, and Transcripts 7.1, 7.3, 7.4,
246
Notes to Pages 58–59

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and 7.5, analyzing a single class in which professor and student in a modified Socratic class-
room coproduced a very smooth case narrative.) Of course, even in the more Socratic class-
rooms, there are many instances where students do not take their cues, and their voices
then emerge quite clearly as distinct from that of the professor. Alternatively, the goal of a
Socratic exchange might be to in fact draw forth several different voices, as when the pro-
fessor argues one position (say, the plaintiff’s) while asking the student to argue another
(perhaps the defendant’s). (Or different students may occupy these positions.) And then
there are the classrooms characterized more by shorter exchanges, in which a merry po-
lyphony of voices can sometimes be heard. (See Transcripts 7.8, 7.10, 7.11, and 7.12 for
examples of nonmonologic exchanges.) Interestingly, though, one could analyze some
segments of the more diffuse exchanges, involving multiple students, as coproduced mono-
logue—as when the professor provides a frame punctuated by questions that individual
students (or even the class as a whole) chime in to answer correctly in simple words or
phrases.
43. Although there is some discussion of statutes (i.e., legislation passed by legisla-
tures such as Congress), regulations, and other legal genres, reading cases overwhelmingly
dominates the first-year classes of this study. We therefore primarily focus on the struc-
ture of the case law genre and core features of a legal reading thereof. Where relevant, I
also point out aspects of other genres, demonstrating that they indeed only accentuate
further the aspects of a legal reading outlined in our discussion of reading cases. On the
case law genre generally, see Mertz, “‘Realist’ Models,” “The Uses of History,” and “Con-
sensus and Dissent”; J. B. White,