The Language of Law School This page intentionally left blank

“Mr. Karlin!” Perini cried sharply.
Nearby, I heard a tremendous thud. . . .
“Mr. Karlin,” Perini said, ambling toward my side of
the room, “why don’t you tell us about the case of 
Hurley v.
Eddingfield
?”
Karlin already had his notebook open. His voice was
quavering.
“Plaintiff ’s intestate,” he began. He got no further.
“What does 
that
mean?” Perini cried from across the room.
He began marching fiercely up the aisle toward Karlin. “In-
tes
-
tate,” he said, “in-
tes
-tate. What is that? Something to do with
the
stomach
? Is this an anatomy class, Mr. Karlin?” Perini’s
voice had become shrill with a note of open mockery and at the
last word people burst out laughing, louder than at anything
Perini had said before.
He was only five or six feet from Karlin now. Karlin stared
up at him and blinked and finally said, “No.”
“No, I didn’t think so,” Perini said. “What if the word
was ‘testate’? What would that be? Would we have moved
from the stomach”—Perini waved a hand and there was
more loud laughter when he leeringly asked his question—
“
else
where?”
“I think,” Karlin said weakly, “that if the word was
‘testate’ it would mean he had a will.”
“And ‘intestate’ that he didn’t have a will. I see.” Perini
wagged his head. “And who is this ‘he,’ Mr. Karlin?”
Karlin was silent. He shifted in his seat as Perini stared
at him. Hands had shot up across the room. Perini called rap-
idly on two or three people who gave various names—Hurley,
Eddingfield, the plaintiff. Finally someone said that the case
didn’t say.
“The case doesn’t 
say
!” Perini cried, marching down the
aisle. “The case does 
not say
. Read the case. 
Read
 the case!
Care
fully!”
1

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44
Similarity
If Socrates really used this method, he wasn’t given the hem-
lock soon enough
.
2
I
n the first excerpt, we see depicted for popular audiences the classic genre of law
school teaching: the infamous Socratic method, by some accounts dreaded by
law students across the United States (and across generations). This passage cap-
tures many of the features often mentioned as core aspects of Socratic method teach-
ing: extended questioning of a single student about a case assigned for that particular
day, frequent interruption, few (if any) answers provided, an insistence on close
attention to the language of the cases, a challenging, if not hostile, tone.
Following an initial section in which I provide some theoretical background,
this chapter begins the actual language analysis in the second section, which takes
as its starting point the classic form of Socratic method law school teaching, ask-
ing what this method does when performed in the traditional style. As we will see,
there are law teachers now who vary considerably from the traditional style in a
number of ways. But just as we might begin an exploration of a literary genre by
asking about the classic or canonical form it has taken, I start by examining the
Socratic method in its most highly structured form.
3
 As it turns out, a key feature
of Socratic method teaching is the new relationship with language that it creates
for the students. An important part of forging this new relationship with language
is the inculcation of new conceptions or ideologies of language. And when I say
“language,” I mean not only spoken language but also written language, the writ-
ten texts of the cases that are the primary focus of most class discussions in the
typical first-year classroom.
After examining the classic Socratic discourse form and the metalinguistic
ideology it conveys, this chapter moves on in the third section to analyze how this
ideology is inculcated in the primary classrooms of this study (which all vary in
one degree or another from the classic form). In particular, I focus on the internal
categories of the case law genre. We will see how, in the process of introducing these
fundamental categories (facts, law, etc.), professors inculcate a distinctive, legal
metalinguistic orientation, an orientation that is broadly shared across all of the
classes in the study. A close examination of classroom discourse structure reveals
not only a shared underlying orientation, but also intriguing resonances in subtle
aspects of linguistic structure despite some very obvious divergences in professors’
discourse styles. However, before moving on to the language analysis itself, the first
section of this chapter provides a background, reviewing developments in analy-
ses of texts and their social contexts with a particular focus on recent work in lin-
guistic anthropology that addresses this topic.
Text, Context, and Ideology
Because law school teaching in the first year is very much focused on written legal
texts, we are drawn to the question of such texts and their use in social contexts

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Learning to Read Like a Lawyer
45
generally, an issue on which anthropologists and linguists have focused a great deal
in recent years.