The Language of Law School This page intentionally left blank

Part III
1. Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins,” 1241.
2. Fineman, 
The Neutered Mother
, 48. This conception of the construction of gendered
lives is the basis of Fineman’s conclusion that “women can and should converge to orga-
nize around overlapping experiences.” Id., 54.
3. Minow, 
Making All the Difference
, 390.
Chapter 7
1. Because this classroom was part of the pilot study, we do not have a semester-long
set of transcripts available for the classrooms in the full study. Thus, we cannot provide
the thorough, statistically informed picture of the overall distribution of turns that is avail-
able for the classrooms in the final study. It is important to have the fuller picture given by
a full semester’s worth of taping, we have found, because there can be considerable varia-
tion among classes in such characteristics as the length of student-professor exchanges,
even in the same classroom.
2. See, e.g., Shaffer and Redmount, 
Lawyers, Law Students, and People
.
3. Kerr, “Decline.”
4. See, e.g., Friedland, “How We Teach,” 27–31. Friedland circulated questionnaires
to 2,000 law professors and received 574 responses; he notes that “no claims are made for
the survey’s scientific validity,” but argues that the survey nevertheless provides some in-
sight into law professors’ practices. Id., 3. (It’s unclear on what principle the professors
and schools were selected, but the process does not appear to have been strictly random.)
Notes to Pages 132–142
253

---

He did find that 97% of the respondents reported using Socratic method teaching “at least
some of the time in first year classes.” Id., 28. There is no attempt to define Socratic teach-
ing in the survey. The law professors who responded to this survey also reported using a
variety of other teaching techniques, particularly in upper-level classes.
5. Id., 28 n. 77; see also Kerr as an example of someone who includes more specific
constraints in his definition:
I consider “traditional” Socratic method to be a teaching style in which the professor
selects a single student without warning and questions the student about a particular
judicial opinion that has been assigned for class. Often the professor begins by ask-
ing the student to state the facts of the case and then asks the student to explain how
the court reasoned to an answer. The professor might then test the student’s under-
standing of the case by posing a series of hypotheticals and asking the student to apply
the reasoning of the case to the new fact patterns. The purpose of this questioning is
to explore the strengths and weaknesses of various legal arguments that might be
marshaled to support or attach a given rule of decision. To that end, the professor’s
inquiries are often designed to expose the weaknesses in the student’s responses. (Kerr,
“Decline,” 113 n. 3)
6. See Shaffer and Redmount, 
Lawyers, Law Students, and People
, 166.
7. Id.
8. Friedland, “How We Teach,” 28.
9. Id., 28–29.
10. Kerr, “Decline,” 122–123.
11. For example, one alternative teaching method mentioned by Friedland is role-
playing. “How We Teach,” 30. As we will see, however, depending on one’s definition of
role-playing, it is possible that some kinds of role-play are viewed by many professors as
inherent to Socratic teaching. Again, sorting this out and determining with any accuracy
just how much change has occurred is close to impossible in the absence of detailed ob-
servational data from earlier eras.
12. The three classrooms are in law schools that range from the second largest to the
smallest schools in our study (ranging from more than 1,500 students to under 800). Class
#1 is the classroom where our research began, and Class #8 was the last to be studied.
Class #1 had 115 students and was a standard, large, first-year Contracts class in an
urban local law school in the northeastern United States. The teacher was a European
American male in his late forties, a graduate of an elite law school with more than ten years
of teaching experience at the time we taped his class. He conducted the class in a format
that conformed relatively closely to the stereotype of Socratic law school teaching, calling
on students using formal address (Ms. or Mr. + surname), and then asking them to de-
scribe and discuss assigned cases. The overall tone in the classroom was noticeably hu-
morous, with repeated laughter by the students and joking by the instructor. With 11.3%
students of color, the class was less diverse than the national average (see Table 3.1) and
fell into the middle range of the classrooms in the study in terms of diversity. Asian Ameri-
cans constituted the largest minority group (7.0%) and African Americans the smallest
(4.3%). There were no Latino students in the class. In terms of gender, this classroom was
again in the middle range relative to other classes in this study and had a slightly higher
percentage of women (43.5) than the national average.
Please note that the total percentages given for students of color in each class may
include students who were not African American, Asian American, Latino, or Latina,
but who also would not be identified as white or Caucasian. We recognize that the kind
of classification necessary for quantitative studies of this kind is necessarily crude and
254
Notes to Pages 143–144

---

lacks the subtlety or precision that more fine-grained qualitative work on race would
permit.
Class #4 was another of the larger and more Socratic classrooms in the study. This
class of 106 students was taught by a European American man in his early thirties, in a law
school that was toward the top of the regional tier of law schools. Trained at an elite law
school, this teacher was the least experienced in the study, with fewer than five years in
law teaching. Using formal address and a seating chart, he regularly called on students to
discuss the day’s cases for extended periods. With 12.3% students of color, this class came
right after the classes in elite/prestige schools (which were the three most diverse classes
in the study) in terms of diversity; however, unlike those classes, this class was consider-
ably less diverse than the national average. This can be seen in every category: 5.7% Afri-
can American students, 3.8% Asian American students, and 2.8% Latino/a students. The
class was third-highest in the study in its percentage of women (44.3).
Class #5 was one of the five large (90+) classes in the study. It had 98 students and
was taught by a European American male in an elite/prestige law school. It was one of the
most traditional Socratic classrooms in the study in terms of tone and style. The teacher,
a man in his midforties who was trained at an elite law school, was one of the most expe-
rienced in the study (with more than fifteen years’ experience). The class was the third most
diverse in the study, with 21.4% students of color: 10.2% African American, 6.1% Asian
American, but only 2.0% Latino/a. There was also one Native American student in this
class. With 40.8% women, the class fell into the lower-middle range of classes in this study
in terms of gender diversity.
13. At oral argument, judges on an appeals court question the attorneys about the
case, pointing out deficiencies and pushing them to clarify their arguments. Notice that
professors in a classroom of first-year students face a more daunting task, in that they have
to keep some kind of discussion going in order to do their job, and they are working with
novices not yet fully trained to keep up their part of a difficult exchange. One has to won-
der, then, if even the toughest Socratic teachers haven’t always employed some of the de-
vices found in our modified Socratic classrooms, just as a matter of pedagogical (and
discursive) necessity.
14. Matoesian,