The Language of Law School This page intentionally left blank

Reading
 like a lawyer turns out
to be an essential ingredient in the transformation to 
thinking
 like a lawyer. And,
of course, the way that professors determine whether students are learning to read
like lawyers throughout the semester is by assessing how they 
talk
 about legal texts.
In this chapter we move further into an analysis of the transformative process in
first-year law school classrooms, turning now to ask about the contours of the legal
personae revealed in talk about legal texts and about the spaces these people in-
habit. In other words, what kind of people are revealed and created through legal
readings—not only the people in the texts, but also the speakers in the classrooms?
And what are the points of reference, the landscapes, within which they operate?
We will find that as students shift to thinking like lawyers, they at times speak from
an analytical distance, while at other times they actually stand in the shoes of new,
legal personae. As students and professors speak from these positions, we can dis-
cern the outlines of a distinctively legal drama, with its own characters and set-
tings made real as they are discussed and enacted in law school settings. In this
chapter, we focus more carefully on metalinguistic features such as reported speech,
footing, framing, role-play, deixis, and pronomial usage to understand this pro-
cess in detail.
Using this approach, I delineate a somewhat different, more complicated under-
standing of the law school process than is usually indicated by those who character-
ize it as learning to think like a lawyer.
1
 Although I will not constantly use quotation
marks to mark this particular framing of the concept “thinking like a lawyer,” I would
ask that this more complex understanding of the phrase be assumed wherever it
appears in my text. First, this has long been an established catchphrase used by the

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legal profession (and those studying or writing about it) to describe the essence of
law school training.
2
 It represents, in a sense, a distillation of indigenous ideology, a
summary of how the process is viewed from within.
3
 However, to unpack or analyze
this ideology, we find that we have to understand more than a mere acontextual
outline of cognitive processes. Instead, we must examine what it means to read or
talk like a lawyer, and this means that we are analyzing metalinguistic norms and
ideologies: we are looking at a new relationship with language that is created for
lawyers. As I have already argued, embedded in this new relationship is a hidden
epistemology, one with significant moral dimensions.
Numerous writers have commented on the ways that thinking like a lawyer
pulls law students away from altruistic, public interest goals.
4
 Robert Granfield’s
study of legal education characterizes this change as a shift from a “justice-oriented
consciousness” to a “game-oriented consciousness.”
5
 Being able to argue either side
of a case or to concoct a legal argument by “testing facts against . . . legal doctrine”
replaces concerns with substantive justice.
6
 But it is through the filter of legal lan-
guage, written and spoken—as well as of metalinguistic structuring and ideology
7
—
that this change is effected. The change definitely includes these shifts to more
strategic, adversarial, and doctrinal approaches, but it is even more profound: it
alters how stories are constructed and read, which contexts are salient, how people
are categorized and conceived, how selves are constructed. In sum, there are en-
tirely new views of reality and authority, new landmarks and ways of speaking, al-
tered conceptions of themselves and others (and their relations to the world around
them) packed quietly into the reading lessons students encounter in the first-year
law school curriculum.
Metalinguistic structuring is performing powerful work here, carrying with it
tacit (and not so tacit) linguistic ideologies, not the least of which is a strong, al-
most isomorphic relationship implied between how people talk and how they think.
And so my conscious bracketing of the phrase “thinking like a lawyer” not only
indicates that it is a well-worn indigenous saying or adage, but that the saying it-
self glosses over the degree to which what is changing is as much how students read
and talk as how they think. Indeed, language operates as more than a filter here; it
not only mediates the shift in students’ perceptions, it is the stuff of which the
change is made, the backbone of the new legal approach they must learn if they are
to be fluent in the law.
8
 When legally trained professionals speak of this alteration
as a sharpening of thought, they are often implying that it involves a honing of
general analytic ability rather than a shift into a very particular, culturally laden