The Language of Law School This page intentionally left blank

[smiles, silent, looks down]
Prof.:
What bothers you, I take it, is the parties thought about the problem of
labor and increased price in labor. And you’re suggesting this is
something they recognized. Now, do you want to go from there to say,
“If they recognized that (.) there was a problem with the cost of labor (.)
if there was going to be a stunningly disturbed market, they should have
said something about it,” is that what you want to say? If that’s what
you want to say, where does that leave you?
Student:
[again, silence, looks down]

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On Becoming a Legal Person
125
By the end of the exchange, the professor has essentially adopted the student’s voice,
using indirect speech (“you’re suggesting this was something they recognized”).
The student has refused to budge from her chosen register (“It just bothers me”)
and has indexed that refusal with silence. And so the professor speaks for her, tak-
ing her place in the dialogue, and in the absence of any cooperation from her,
imbuing her with the correct voice. This is a voice that produces arguments from
a particular discursive position, not a voice that expresses emotion. His insistent
continuation of the dialogue, even without help from his interlocutor, forces on
this segment of speech the metapragmatic interpretation he seeks to impose: that
this instance of speaking is an event of a particular discourse type (Socratic dia-
logue with its accompanying metapragmatic rules). One key rule of this type of
discourse is that people keep talking, keep coming up with reasons and justifica-
tions for articulated and antagonistically defended positions (“Where does that lead
you?”). Her silence can be read as inserting a competing interpretation into the
exchange: this chunk of speech is an exchange in which she wishes to express a felt
dissatisfaction with a case outcome. The power differential between the two inter-
locutors is perhaps evidenced by the fact that the final interpretation goes to the
professor. Yet her strongly maintained, smiling silence is a resistance that is not
ultimately overcome by him. The timing of the class’s laughter obviously reinforces
the professor’s signal that her response was inappropriate.
The technique of taking a student’s place in the dialogue when the student
does not respond as desired is used in many of the classrooms of this study. More
unusual but dramatic illustrations of the general metapragmatic struggle at work
here are instances in which the professor literally dictates to the student which words
to use. In one particularly vivid example of this, the professor actually instructs a
student who has answered “no” to “try ‘yes’ ”:
Transcript 6.24 [5/24/21]
Prof.:
Let’s put it slightly differently. Is the party making the promise, “if I buy
the land, I’ll sell it to you,” surrendering any legal right?
Student:
No.
Prof.:
What do you mean, “no”? Try “yes.”
Class:
[[laughter]] (.02)
Prof.:
Say (.) “yes.”
Student:
Yes.
Prof.:
Why?
Class:
[[laughter]]
In this excerpt we see a movement from more implicit metapragmatic indicators
that a student’s answers were unsatisfactory to a breakthrough into very explicit
regimentation when all else failed. This more explicit metapragmatic regimenta-
tion, directing the student to repeat (“Say ‘yes’”), is identical in form to the
metalinguistic formulations found across many cultures in child language social-
ization routines, which typically take “the form of explicit prompting by the
caregiver or other member of the group. . . . The prompting routine is itself marked

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126
Similarity
by characteristic linguistic features. For example, the routine is usually but not
always initiated by an imperative verb form meaning ‘say’ or ‘do,’ followed by the
utterance to be repeated.”
33
 The modeling of correct language use in the Socratic
routine above, then, invokes one of the more powerful linguistic socialization tech-
niques available in the human repertoire. There is a particularly apt comparison
between this kind of law school exchange and the routines used to socialize Kaluli
children.
34
The exchange in this transcript is also a marked example of what con-
versation analysts call “repair,” in which the professor is inviting (indeed, order-
ing) the student to correct a prior response.
35
 This seemingly banal invitation to
repair, and other, more subtle versions of it throughout these classrooms, actually
contains a correlative invitation to reformulate the self of the student into whose
mouth new words are put. This new self is first and foremost a “black belt” of legal
argument, distanced and separated from the emotional, socially situated personal
or nonprofessional self. This separation is subtly reinforced through multiple as-
pects of classroom discursive form, including elevation of argumentative position-
ing as a top priority for legal speakers, an insistence on primacy of legal filters for
making sense of legal stories and characters, the ubiquitous elision of footing, and
frequent use of role-playing.
During role-playing exchanges, professors push students into new concep-
tualizations of the person by literally placing them in the shoes of legal personae,
demanding that they speak in this new voice. In these exchanges, the socializa-
tion process comes still closer to home for students. Here, in a sense, the devel-
opment of legal personae for students becomes more personal, for they are asked
not only to describe people in certain terms, but to imagine themselves as those
people, to speak in their voices. And because of the elision of footing often found
in these exchanges, the boundary between those other voices and a student’s own
voice blurs. The strategic arguer who is the buyer/plaintiff speaks in the same
voice as the plaintiff’s attorney, and in the same voice as the student articulating
(animating? authoring?) the possible arguments in light of the array of available
discursive positions. The scenarios can be derived from the actual events of cases
the students read or from hypotheticals created by the professor; the difference
becomes unimportant as parallels in argumentative positioning are foregrounded.
At the same time, emotion and morality become background, mobilizable to the
degree that strategic interests demand.
We have already seen a number of examples of role-playing in previous tran-
script excerpts. Recall that in Transcript 6.5, the professor places the student in
the role of an interlocutor in an exchange between legal parties and a fierce judge,
culminating in a shift where the student admonishes himself in the judge’s voice.
In Transcript 4.13, the student is placed near the top of a flagpole as the professor
cruelly revokes an offer at the last minute. Transcript 4.19 found a professor speak-
ing in the voice of an employer, inviting the students in the class into the role of
employees. As we will see in the rest of this chapter, role-playing in law school class-
rooms repeatedly locates students in a new legal landscape, where the important
compass points are features of discourse. In the process, the students themselves
move out of accustomed frames to speak in the voices of personae defined by the
demands of that legal discourse. In the following exchange, a professor is appar-

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On Becoming a Legal Person
127
ently attempting to guide a student into playing the role of herself—but it is an
interestingly abstract “standard average law student” from whom he wants to hear: