The Language of Law School This page intentionally left blank

Law and the Language of Identity
, 54–55; see also Atkinson, 
Our Mas-
ters’ Voices
; Tannen, “Repetition in Conversation.”
15. There are 14 examples of this in a set of 48 pair-parts (thus constituting more
than a quarter of the total pair-parts in the extended dialogue).
16. Atkinson and Drew, 
Order in Court
; Tannen, “Repetition in Conversation.”
17. The professor begins his turn with positive affirmations of the student’s previ-
ous turn, such as “right,” “yeah,” or “okay” in 19 of his 48 turns. He also backchannels the
student’s ongoing turns using “right” and “okay” at several points.
18. In one of the other modified Socratic classrooms, we find a similar pattern, with
the professor talking 79% of the time and clearly giving the students significant breaks.
The third modified Socratic classroom has a somewhat less marked distribution in favor
of the professor, but he nonetheless occupies almost 70% of class time (67%), leaving the
students to hold the floor for only 31% (the remaining percentage is attributed to the whole
class, as when the entire class responds to a question).
19. This is one reason that uptake analysis proves to be less fruitful in the modi-
fied Socratic classroom; the impact of a student response on the subsequent professor
question is significantly attenuated by these intervening discursive segues. A better
measure of how the student response is received is frequently found at the beginning of
the professor turns in these classes, rather than in the question with which the professor
turn ends.
Notes to Pages 145–149
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20. To add them up precisely: 19 instances of professor-initial affirmations, 8 of
student-initial iconic repetitions/parallelism, 14 instances of professor-initial repetitive
parallelism, 2 instances of supportive professor backchannels, totaling 43 instances of
cohesive-supportive discursive devices in a sequence of 48 pair-parts. (Note that, of
course, some of the devices overlap within a single pair-part.)
21. This also occurs frequently within turns, as when the professor repeats a phrase
that a student has produced that is particularly apt (“He’s awarding them their expecta-
tions, okay, he’s awarding them their expectations”), or repeats a phrase he himself has
introduced (“ ‘in accordance with a real or apparent intention of the party against ().’ ‘Ac-
cordance with a real or apparent intention’ ”).
There is an interesting similarity between law professors’ efforts to provide a frame-
work for students’ legal narratives in these classrooms and the way that teachers in earlier
educational settings build a scaffolding so that students can learn and produce appropri-
ate narratives. Michaels, “Narrative Presentations.” The parallels we have found between
linguistic routines used here and those used in early education or language socialization
suggest that there are some powerful discursive tools in use to help reorient students’ lin-
guistic practices.
22. Matoesian, personal communication, 11/21/05.
23. Transcript 7.7 provides some very nice examples of this: the professor begins with
an “all right” that marks off the doctrinal question that students are supposed to ask them-
selves. Note that the segment that is marked off here is simultaneously a chunk of discourse
(question-answer pair-part), a projected mental process (approaching the problem as
chunks of doctrine to be analyzed in Q/A form), and a section of the applicable legal doc-
trine (“benefit-detriment question”).
In his ensuing commentary, the professor urges the student (and the rest of the class
along with her) to quickly reach (epistemic and discursive) certainty by asking (and an-
swering at the same time) the question “right?” three times in succession. (This obviously
also contributes to poetic structure as well.) In each case, the student is urged to consider
and quickly reject tempting but legally incorrect lines of thought, and this small discourse
marker is urging agreement at the same time as it serves multiple other discursive and
pedagogical functions.
24. Matoesian suggests that these be thought of as epistemic stance instructions,
“bounding each instruction in a sequence but also conveying an aura of epistemic certainty
or authority to the proposition.” Matoesian, personal communication, 11/21/05. He notes
that to the degree that these function iconically with “an epistemologically and ontologically
privileged form of knowledge,” imparted through the professor’s legally framed discourse,
there is a subtle mirroring of linguistic and legal authority. Id. It would be interesting to
compare the patterning found in law school training with that in other forms of pedagogy
to discern more clearly the line separating authoritative features of professors’ discourse
generally from the features that might be more distinctive to legal training.
25. There is a marked disparity between the amounts of shorter dialogue found in
these classes and that found in two of the three modified Socratic classrooms (5% and 6%
in these two modified Socratic classes as compared with 13%, 22%, 42%, and 46% in the
short-exchange classes). The third modified Socratic classroom (Class #1) provides an
interesting exception: there 60% of the time was spent in focused dialogue, but 24% of the
time was spent in shorter exchanges. We classified it as a modified Socratic classroom
because the overall structure of individual classes in Class #1 was similar to that found in
the other modified Socratic classes, with only a few students serving as the key interlocu-
tors on any given day. However, the professor routinely paused to take questions from
numerous students at the end of the lengthy Socratic discussions. This contributed to a
256
Notes to Pages 149–155

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higher percentage of shorter exchanges in that classroom than was found in the other, more
Socratic classrooms.
26. There is also some variation among the short-exchange classes, with Classes #2
and #3 (interestingly, at opposite ends of the law school status hierarchy) actually having
more time spent in extended exchanges than in shorter ones, despite the fact that in each
category their relative percentages placed them as considerably less Socratic than the more
Socratic classrooms, and as having percentages of shorter discourse most similar to the
more conversational classes. The difference in each case is taken up by professor mono-
logue, which in Class #2 occupied 50% of the time and in Class #3 occupied 63% of the
time. Thus, we could understand these classes as falling closer on the continuum to the
lecture-style class than did the two other short-exchange classes (which had 29 and 33%
monologue, respectively) and as having a fairly eclectic mix of discourse styles overall.
27. To protect the identities of informants, I have identified students only by an
initial (Ms. L., Mr. U., etc.), and these are not the actual initials of their last names. In
classes where professors called on students by their first names, I have substituted alter-
native first names to convey the overall informal character of the discourse while still
preserving anonymity.
28. This night school Contracts class, taught in a local law school, was the third-
smallest in the study, with 76 students. The teacher, a European American woman trained
at a regional law school, was in her late forties. One of the more experienced teachers in
the study, she had been teaching more than ten years. The class was one of the more infor-
mal classes in the study, although the teacher did engage in some focused Socratic-style
exchanges and extended lecturing. This was the least diverse classroom of the study, with
only 6.6% students of color and 32.9% women. There were no Asian American students
and only 1.3% African American students. Interestingly, however, the percentage of Latino/
a students was above the national average (5.3).
29. With only 53 students, this Contracts class in a local, midwestern law school was
the second-smallest in the study. It was taught by a European American woman in her early
forties, trained at a local law school. She was an experienced teacher (more than ten years
of teaching). A highly informal classroom characterized by the use of first names and many
student-initiated turns, this was also the most egalitarian classroom in the study in terms
of gender participation rates. The class far exceeded the national average at the time in
percentage of women (54.7); along with Class #8, it had the highest percentage of women
in the study. But the class was at the low end in terms of racial diversity, with only 11.3%
students of color. In a profile quite similar to that of Class #1 (also taught at a local law
school in an urban setting), Class #6 had a high representation of Asian American students
(5.7%) and relatively low percentages of African American and Latino/a students (fewer
than 2% each). This class, obviously, had “other” minority students as well.
30. As noted in the text, it’s a bit difficult to delineate the pair-part structure here at
times, but we can count roughly 20 professor turns here mixed in with the turns of the 10
identified and several unidentified students.
31. To be sure, it was also one of the smaller classes, with 53 students. But two of the
classes with still smaller numbers of students did not have 100% participation rates, so
the difference cannot be attributed solely to the class size.
32. Although, as noted in Chapter 2, there are indications (particularly from the
writings of clinical and legal writing professors) that this kind of more active role-play-
ing exercise may be growing in popularity along with other nontraditional pedagogical
techniques.
33. The remaining short-exchange classrooms were Class #2 and Class #8. Class #2,
the largest in the study (135 students), was taught in an elite/prestige law school by a
Notes to Pages 155–164
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man of color. The teacher, himself trained in an elite school, was in his midthirties and
had been teaching for more than five years. Like the other short-exchange classes, this
class did include traditional Socratic features, including some use of the traditional
method of calling on students (using formal address) to discuss the day’s assigned cases.
However, there was also fairly regular rupturing of this formality, with students break-
ing in to ask questions. This was one of the two most racially diverse classrooms in the
study, with 24.0% students of color: 8.1% Asian American and 10.5% African American
students. The percentage of Latino students (4.4) was slightly below the national aver-
age. In terms of gender, the class was slightly below the national average, with 40.7%
women (placing it at the low end of the middle range in terms of classrooms included in
this study).
Class #8, also in an elite/prestige law school, was the smallest in the study, with only
32 students. The teacher, a woman of color, was in her early forties and had been teaching
more than ten years. A highly informal class, it was also by far the most diverse in the study,
with 46.9% students of color: 12.5% African American and 21.9% Asian American stu-
dents. But the percentage of Latino/a students (3.1) was actually below the national aver-
age. The class also had the highest percentage of women in the study (56.2).
34. This Contracts class was taught in a midwestern regional law school; it had 90
students. The professor was a European American male in his late forties who had been
trained at a regional law school and was among our more experienced teachers (more than
fifteen years). Along with Class #3, this class was at the low end of the study both in terms
of racial diversity and gender balance. It had only 7.7% students of color: 3.3% African
American, 3.3% Asian American, and 1.1% Latino/a. The class was 33.3% female.
35. Another measure of the degree of ongoing dialogue is the percentage of continuing
student turns found in each class (as opposed to first turns). Only 28% of student turns in
Class #7 are continuing turns, as opposed to 45 to 90% in the other classes.
36. This is a striking example of why counting turns alone fails to give an adequate
picture of overall classroom dynamics.
37. An enduring difference, noted earlier, is the greater number of professor ques-
tions devoted to drawing out the desired responses in Socratic classes. However, even in
the less focused exchanges we see that although the professors are switching speakers more
frequently, they still have to at times fish for promising responses, dropping hints and cues
and encouraging comments such as “If you pick this one up, you’re going to be reading all
of the materials very, very well. This is a difficult question.”
38. See Zemans and Rosenblum,