The Language of Law School This page intentionally left blank

A Shared Vision of Law?
In asking about similarities, we can assess whether there is a shared worldview or
cultural framework that cuts across the differing classrooms of this study. This is
an empirical way of approaching a question with which legal scholars and philoso-
phers have struggled mightily: Just what is “law”? How is it defined, how does it
work? As an anthropologist, I would rephrase this question to take account of his-
tory and location, not assuming that law is the same thing in all times and places,
or indeed that something we could call law is present everywhere.
1
 And I would
also be aware of the fact that there are many vantages from which to answer this
question, even within one society.
2
 Legal professionals are likely to view law differ-
ently than do laypeople, and there are also frequent divergences in vision among
professionals and among laypeople.
3
 In this book, my focus is on one version of
the “expert” vision, the understanding of law imparted to students—initiates into
the legal profession in the United States.
The legal realist tradition and its modern cousin, the field of sociolegal stud-
ies, correctly insist that to achieve a meaningful understanding of legal processes,
we must examine the face of law on the ground, as it affects and is shaped by the
people it governs.
4
 Scholars have often written of the difference between law “on
the books” and law “in action,” as if these were always opposed and distinct things.
5
And it is certainly true that written case law and legislation do little to capture the
overall shape of legal interventions in our lives. Yet I would argue that a full in-
quiry into law on the ground requires us to study those who translate and admin-
ister the law—to examine the views and writings of experts such as judges and
legislators.
6
 If the formal frameworks of reasoning employed by lawyers and judges

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14
Introduction
are only part of the story of how law actually operates, they nonetheless remain as
a scaffolding on which much else builds: the linguistic structuring through which
a great deal of legal decision making proceeds.
7
Thus, we can rephrase the question a bit, asking: Is there a central vision or
form of reasoning shared by those who have received legal training in the United
States today, across their many differences? How does U.S. law, at the broadest
level, conceive of the world and people with which it deals; is there an underly-
ing worldview or epistemology that binds together the diverse ends of the legal
profession by virtue of a similar initial socialization into legal language? There
are, of course, multiple layers to consider in answering even this narrower ques-
tion, for beyond any common expert understanding of legal categories and con-
cepts, legal practitioners also share forms of practical knowledge and reasoning
based on commonalities in the work they perform, on similar informal ideologies
or folklore about law, and so forth.
8
 Here we approach the question of a shared
vision of law through an examination of the way that students are ushered into the
world of legal thinking, treating the educational process of legal training as a win-
dow on that world, a place where the modes of thinking that characterize a legal
worldview will be revealed as they are imparted to initiates. And indeed, this study
does find that there are certain core understandings that are shared across the class-
rooms of this study, understandings that, when examined together, reveal a core
orientation underlying U.S. legal reasoning.
Differing Views of Law from Within?
At the same time as the study examines shared understandings, it also investigates
how the classrooms we observed diverge from one another. In inquiring about
differences among the classrooms, we ask: To what degree is any common vision
refracted differentially through the experiences of students and teachers who come
to the law from varying social backgrounds? If all law students must learn to speak
roughly similar legal language, to use the same forms of reasoning, do some stu-
dents take to this new language differently from others? Do some students approach
or react to their new legal vision of the world in distinctive ways? Do some profes-
sors create—whether through deliberate design or not—different kinds of class-
room settings within which this new worldview is inculcated, and if so, how do
various students respond to these differences? And what is the impact of divergent
law school cultures on the teaching and learning processes?
Here we enter the debate about social difference that is raging all over our
culture today—and the legal academy is, predictably, no exception. Although fun-
damental legal categories and the methods used to teach them were for many years
viewed as somehow neutral, above the social divisions found in society generally,
powerful arguments have emerged to undermine this presumption of neutrality.
9
Not only is the administration of justice in the United States deeply skewed to favor
those in power, scholars have suggested, but indeed the basic legal categories and
forms of reasoning themselves set up an uneven playing field.
10
 Hidden behind
standard legal concepts such as the time-honored “reasonable man” standard, critics
have argued, are deeply social visions of what kinds of experience count—and those

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Law, Language, and the Law School Classroom
15
visions privilege some members of the American public over others.
11
 At the same
time, when critics have attempted to specify how people differ from one another,
they have encountered difficult dilemmas that arise from attempting to generalize
using categories such as race and gender.
12
 Often discussed under the rubric of
“essentialism,” these dilemmas emerge when we oversimplify based on a social label,
assuming, for example, that all women share a common worldview that is differ-
ent from that of all men, and forgetting that there is a great deal of variability among
women. To continue the example, the notion that there is a homogeneous “essen-
tial” woman whose view of life is completely different from that of men also risks
missing the large areas in which some women’s and men’s views overlap. As with
so many intellectual developments (nature versus nurture, economic versus moral
visions of human motivation), the choice when posed starkly seems a bit ridicu-
lous: surely we can do better than to argue either that gender (or race, or class)
makes no difference whatever, or that it is all-determining. Increasingly, research-
ers seeking to do justice to the complexities involved have sought models that take
account of differences without ignoring similarities and complicated variations.
The work of legal theorist Martha Fineman sets an important example for this, as
when she uses concepts such as “gendered lives” to capture the idea that people
can share orientations based on similar lived experiences rather than based on some
common and uniform “essence.”
13
The results of this study suggest that differences among people (notably by
race and gender) combine with differences across contexts (e.g., distinct kinds of
schools, classrooms, and teaching styles) to create a complex patterning. Thus, 
the
law school classroom is indeed a different place for students of varying backgrounds.
Following Fineman, I argue for a complicated and grounded approach to analysis
of this difference, one that looks carefully at varieties of shared experience and
context, taking into account similarities as well as differences among students and
professors.
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