The Language of Law School This page intentionally left blank

Ideology
, 28.
14. Id., 85.
Chapter 6
1. I except scholars who have examined the law school process critically and/or from
an empirical point of view—for example, Robert Granfield, whose sociological study of
law school education takes a somewhat similar approach to the question. Granfield, 
Mak-
ing Elite Lawyers
.
2. See, e.g., Kahlenberg, 
Broken Contract
; Kerlow, 
Poisoned Ivy
; Granfield, 
Making Elite
Lawyers
.
3. This is by no means unique to legal education. For example, the Gaelic speakers I
studied during my doctoral dissertation research had a phrase, “no burden to carry,” that
distilled an older linguistic ideology regarding their language. See Mertz, “Language and
Mind” and “No Burden to Carry.”
4. See, e.g., Erlanger and Klegon, “Socialization Effects”; Granfield, 
Making Elite
Lawyers
; D. Kennedy, 
Legal Education
.
5. Granfield, 
Making Elite Lawyers
, 52.
6. Id., 59, 98.
7. For a discussion of the way language and language ideologies can act as filters for
social experience and the formulation of social identity, see Mertz, “Pragmatic and Semantic
Change” and “Sociolinguistic Creativity.”
8. On conceptualizing language as more than a transparent filter for legal interac-
tion, see Mertz, “Language, Law, and Social Meanings.”
9. See Sarat and Felstiner, 
Divorce Lawyers
.
10. See Bakhtin, 
The Dialogic Imagination.
11. See Briggs, 
Disorderly Discourse
; Matoesian, 
Law and the Language of Identity
;
Parmentier, “The Political Function of Reported Speech”; Tannen, “Waiting for the
Mouse.”
12. Matoesian, 
Law and the Language of Identity
, 111.
13. Goffman, 
Forms of Talk
.
14. Id., 128.
15. See Hanks, 
Referential Practice
.
16. Of course, this use of imagined direct quotation is not unique to law teaching;
it is also found in everyday conversation, as well as in other kinds of teaching. On the
one hand, it may have one kind of shared impact across many contexts; that is, it makes
the point more vividly, in essence dramatizing it. On the other hand, it is necessary to
examine each context carefully to understand the social, institutional, and normative
functions of proceeding in this more dramatic or vivid way. In this case, we are examin-
ing the metapragmatic meaning of a move into direct quotation in the particular con-
text of legal discourse and pedagogy.
17. Matoesian, 
Law and the Language of Identity
, 105, 155–159.
18. See Bennett and Feldman, 
Reconstructing Reality in the Courtroom
; Pennington
and Hastie, “A Cognitive Theory of Juror Decisionmaking.”
19. Matoesian, 
Law and the Language of Identity
, 107.
250
Notes to Pages 95–106

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20. There is an interesting shift in speech styles when the professor begins to quote
the Indiana company: “Listen, we got this law in Indiana . . . ” This shift does arguably
serve a pedagogical function: to keep students engaged through a more vivid rendition of
the hypothetical exchange. But it also seems to signal a change from “professor speak” to
the language of the “man on the street,” conveying a sense that we are moving out of a
classroom and listening in on “real” talk. As we move further into the turn, the professor
slides back into a more formal legal-pedagogical register, using phrases like “common-
wealth of Indiana” and “can be made subject to Indiana’s law.” Interestingly, when we begin
to hear the defendant company’s voice, there is once more a shift to a more informal style:
“Forget that, I don’t do business here.”
21. The student actually employs an interesting hybrid quotation form to re-present
the response of the plaintiff. He begins with the form usually associated with indirect quota-
tion (“the seller [con]tends that”). Use of “that” (a syntactic subordinator) is generally ac-
companied by subordination of the remaining part of the quotation to the quoting frame,
with predictable shifts in deictics. Instead, the student then produces a quotation that is at
first ambiguous, but proceeds into a directive that is clearly in direct quotation form (“allow
the personal jurisdiction”). The resulting quotation contains an intriguing combination of
analytic remove—making us aware of the student’s voice—and immediacy (albeit an im-
mediacy that would not work well in actual dialogue with the court, as it employs a style gen-
erally used by higher status interlocutors to lower status ones). By the end of the turn, the
student has shifted to indirect quotation to represent the language of the contractual clause
in question, permitting a nested hierarchy of quotation styles within the short turn that marks
off