The Language of Law School This page intentionally left blank

7.28 min.
In these 26 turns, the professor takes up 23.52 minutes, and the students’ total time
is 1.51 minutes; he thus occupies more than twelve times the amount of time taken
by the students in the dialogue here, although he takes the same number of turns.
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Notice that if we ignore the amount of time taken by the professor turns, the dis-
cursive structure is not unlike that in our short-exchange classes (and, just as in
some of those more conversational classes, if we ignore the fact that different stu-
dent speakers are responding to the questions, we would find some similarities to

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Professorial Style in Context
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the more Socratic classes).
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Thus, we find some striking differences but also con-
tinuities in structure among the different classrooms of the study.
Social Patterns and Teaching Styles
Having identified these differences, we now turn to ask whether there are any ap-
parent relationships between professors’ teaching styles and social patterns, such
as school status. One finding from previous studies points to a difference between
elite/prestige law schools and lower-ranked law schools in terms of emphasis on
legal theory in teaching; professors in higher-ranked schools reported focusing more
on overarching theories behind the law.
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 We find some slight support for that in
the transcripts of this study; professors in the higher-ranked schools do explicitly
discuss jurisprudential and other theories somewhat more than do the professors
in the lower-ranked law schools. One professor who teaches in a regional law school
explicitly acknowledges this:
. . . so I think it’s important that they understand the doctrine. And I know, you know,
at some of the big-name schools, I think, there’s less of that.
 [ . . . ]
Well, you know, if
I’m teaching at Harvard I can go in and teach revolutionary theory or 
[ . . . ]
 to what
extent should we use contract law to advance principles of economic efficiency or
redistribution of wealth and so forth. (Interview 7)
This professor goes on to comment that he will at times digress to give his students
the bigger picture, but notes that in general, he doesn’t think that students are
“prepared to say anything intelligent on the entire subject until they first of all know
what it is and how it works.” On the other hand, though agreeing that there is some-
thing of a difference along these lines, another professor, one teaching at a local
law school, noted that it was also important to convey some theory to students: “I
mean, a certain amount of it 
[legal history and theory]
 is necessary in order to func-
tion well (.) i- if they don’t know who the legal realists are they’ll be in- they could
be embarrassed in a way that would be disempowering 
[ . . . ]
” (Interview 6).
In any case, any differences found among schools of different ranks on this
score are dwarfed by an overarching similarity among the classes: in all of these
schools, the vast majority of class time in the first semester of first-year Contracts
is devoted to learning how to do a legal reading of the cases and to uncovering basic
doctrinal principles. All of the professors agree that this is their primary pedagogi-
cal task, and they uniformly expressed enthusiasm about performing it. A profes-
sor in one of the elite/prestige schools commented that the “first thing” he needed
to accomplish, “obviously, is to teach them the core doctrines in contracts.” Simi-
larly, a professor in one of the local law schools commented that “the law professor’s
job is to, first of all, familiarize students with the body of information that they’re
simply going to have to know