The Language of Law School This page intentionally left blank

party.
Class:
[[laughter]]
Prof.:
Watch carefully, see if that doesn’t work out in practice. There is
something rather interesting going on here. Okay, he’s a Greek, it
shouldn’t make a difference.
The class discussion moves on from this humorous introduction to focus on ques-
tions pertinent to doctrinal issues: Had the Greek servant’s amorous feelings for
his employer’s wife constituted a breach of contract between servant and employer?
Could the employer’s estate use the servant’s behavior as a defense to the servant’s
eventual request for restitution damages? Did it matter whether the amorous feel-
ings had actually interfered with the servant’s performance of his duties, and so
on? Ethnicity is presented as a stereotypic background factor that might affect the
reaction of the court if it were to depart from a standard legal analysis, but this is
tangential to the systematic legal reading with which the class is centrally occupied:
Transcript 6.14 [5/10/3]
Prof.:
[ . . . ]
 Why did they tell us he’s a Greek?
Mr. S.:
I don’t know. I guess they were just interested in that.
Class:
[[laughter]]
Prof.:
Why are they interested in that? Why tell us that he’s a Greek? What if he
were French, what if he were Polish, would it make a difference? What is
it about Greeks? Yes, uh, Ms., uh?
Ms. C.: “C” 
[states last name]
Prof.:
Ms. C.
Ms. C.: After reading 
Zorba the Greek
, I would say maybe because of their
reputation as lovers or--
Prof.:
--There’s this zest for life (.) There is something
going on and there’s all kinds of hideous things about the Greeks that the
Americans sometimes think. Indeed, there are horrible things to think
about virtually every ethnic group you can name. At least that was in the
good old days when you admitted that sort of thing. We don’t do it
anymore. But this court involved in the casebook, seems to feel it
necessary to tell us that Ganas is Greek. And you can bet that it was
plastered all over the opinion, right? There is this thing, we’ll say for the
moment, putting as neutral a face on it as possible, about Greeks in love.
Go on.
There is no attempt to deny that a person’s social background might be decisive in
legal outcomes; indeed, this particular class provides one of the best examples in
the study of a direct discussion of the potential impact of such factors. In other

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118
Similarity
classrooms in this study, professors covered similar cases with no mention what-
ever of ethnicity, stereotypes, or prejudice. At the same time, we can see that even
when these kinds of factors are mentioned, there is no sustained or systematic
analysis of them.
Later in the same class, as the professor turns to another case, there is another
allusion to ethnicity, this time simply as humorous punctuation:
Transcript 6.15 [5/10/13]
Prof.:
Here we are, by the way, with another interesting ethnic group. Swedish
Evangelical Lutheran. What do we know about them? The answer:
absolutely nothing! But they want a church, apparently. Go on.
The class then moves on to a systematic consideration of legal issues: whether the
builder’s failure to construct a church to meet certain specifications constituted a
breach of the contract, justifying the church’s decision not to pay the builder;
whether defects in construction provided the church with an adequate defense
against having to pay the builder damages. The cotextual reference to the previous
discussion about Greeks (“another interesting ethnic group”) underlines the spo-
radic and seemingly haphazard effect of social context on legal results.
This pattern can be found even when questions of race or gender are raised as
directly pertinent to legal results, whether by professors or students. For example,
one case studied in many of the classrooms involved an interracial boxing match
that gave rise to a contractual dispute. Notice how the impact of race is at once
acknowledged and peripheralized: