The Language of Law School This page intentionally left blank

hence to acquire that mastery should be the business of every
earnest student of law.
1
The school is not a neutral objective arena; it is an institution
which has the goal of changing people’s values, skills, and knowl-
edge bases. Yet some portions of the populations . . . bring with
them to school linguistic and cultural capital accumulated
through hundreds of thousands of occasions for practicing the
skills and espousing the values the schools transmit.
2
T
his introductory section discusses the overarching questions motivating this
study. It also provides the review of background concepts and literatures nec-
essary for understanding the basic model of language used throughout the book.
Put simply, this book is organized around two core questions:
* Is a common vision or language of law being taught to initiates across diverse
U.S. law school classrooms? (And if so, what is it?)
* What kinds of differences among classrooms, students, and professors seem to be
salient in creating any divergent refractions of a common vision?
Part II focuses on the first question (similarities among classrooms); Part III ex-
amines the second (differences). Part IV, along with other overall observations,
concludes that both in content and form, U.S. law school classrooms are per-
petuating a vision of law and human conflict that in effect erases certain key as-
pects of social experience. In sum, the language of U.S. law works to create an
erasure or cultural invisibility, as well as an amorality, that are problematic in a

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2
Introduction
society seeking to be truly democratic. Yet, at the same time, we can see a genius
to some aspects of this at once abstract and concrete legal language.
We begin, in Part I, by setting the scene for the rest of the book. Chapter 1
outlines the central conclusions of the study and then takes the reader into the law
school classroom, stepping into the shoes of law students who are beginning to learn
legal language. Chapter 2 provides a more detailed statement of the study’s research
agenda and of the cross-disciplinary perspectives that inform it. Chapter 3 explains
the methodology used and sketches an initial profile of the data.

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Entering the World of U.S. Law
3
1
.
.
Entering the World of U.S. Law
3
M
uch has been written about the first year of law school. There have also been
many attempts to define core aspects of U.S. legal reasoning. This book
considers these two issues together, using a study of the initial law school expe-
rience to shed light on legal worldviews and understandings. One focus of this
research is the content of U.S. legal epistemology (i.e., distinctively legal ways
of approaching knowledge), as revealed in the training of initiates into the
world of law. The study uses close analysis of classroom language to examine the
limits that legal epistemology may place on law’s democratic aspirations. It also
asks whether legal training itself may impact the democratization of the legal
profession—that “public profession”
1
 that figures so prominently in the govern-
ing of our country.
An important corollary of this focus on language as the window to legal epis-
temology is the central role of discourse to law and other sociocultural processes.
In particular, the ideas that people hold about how language works (linguistic ide-
ologies) combine with linguistic structuring to create powerful, often unconscious
effects. In recent years, linguistic anthropologists have made much progress in
developing more precise analytic tools for tracking those effects.
2
 In addition to
studying spoken discourse, they have turned their attention to the impact of writ-
ten texts on social interactions in ritual and institutional settings. This book uses
linguistic anthropological analysis to uncover the ways microlevel processes in lan-
guage embody and perpetuate powerful linguistic ideologies. These ideologies struc-
ture and reflect the social uses of language and text in legal contexts, and thus, I
argue, provide a key foundation for “thinking like a lawyer.”
3
 In this sense, one
thinks like a lawyer because one speaks, writes, and reads like a lawyer. Some would
associate thinking like a lawyer with superior analytic skills in a neutral sense; I

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4
Introduction
would instead characterize the acquisition of lawyerly “thinking” as an initiation
into a particular linguistic and textual tradition found in our society.
To develop a detailed picture of the epistemology and process of legal train-
ing, I obtained tapes and observational notes from a full semester of Contracts
classes in eight different law schools. The law schools range in status from “top five”
to “local” law schools; the professors were diverse in terms of gender, race, and
legal training. Observers (including myself) taped and coded the interactions in
these classes throughout the first semester of law school. Coders then worked with
full transcripts of the tapes and in-class observational notes to quantify aspects of
the turns in each class. They also qualitatively assessed aspects of developing class-
room dynamics. The overall results provide our first detailed observational data
on racial dynamics in law school classrooms; they also are the first to allow com-
parisons across a full range of diverse law schools. Although there has been more
observational study of gender dynamics in law school classrooms than of race,
previous studies of gender did not use methods that permitted fine-grained analy-
ses of aspects of talk in classrooms beyond broad tallying of numbers of turns.
Working from transcripts, we have been able to track both differences and simi-
larities among a broad range of law school classes. A combination of qualitative
and quantitative methods allows us to explicate in detail the language of U.S. law
as it is taught in diverse law schools.
4
The first part of this chapter presents, in summary form, the core argument of
the book. The second part takes the reader inside the law school classroom, sketch-
ing more concretely the kind of discourse found in U.S. law teaching. Our focus is
on the very first semester of law school, when students are initiated into a new way
of thinking and talking about the conflicts with which they will be asked to deal as
attorneys.
Legal Epistemology and Law Teaching
Although much of this book deals with the nuances and complexities of analyzing
U.S. legal language, its central conclusions can be stated in seven relatively simple
propositions:
1. There is a core approach to the world and to human conflict that is per-
petuated through U.S. legal language. This core legal vision of the world and of
human conflict tends to focus on form, authority, and legal-linguistic contexts
rather than on content, morality, and social contexts.
 We can trace this view
through close analysis of the content and structure of the language found in
law teaching and written law texts, as law professors inculcate this distinct
approach and as law students learn to speak it. In the law school classroom,
initiates to the legal profession take their first steps into a world in which the
linguistic processes of combative dialogue and textual exegesis substitute for
substantive, socially grounded moral reasoning.
2. This legal worldview and the language that expresses it are imparted in
all of the classrooms studied, in large part through reorienting the way students
approach written legal texts. This reorientation relies in important ways on a subtle

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Entering the World of U.S. Law
5
shift in linguistic ideology. 
We find this common approach across the many
differences among teachers and classes. Thus, a key function of law school is
actually training to a common language that lawyers use to communicate about
the conflicts with which they must deal. An important part of this shift in-
volves learning to read the “conflict stories” contained in legal cases in a new,
more dispassionate way—guided by a new ideology about language.
3. Although apparently neutral in form, in fact the filtering structure of legal
language taught to students is not neutral.
 Legal training focuses students’ at-
tention away from a systematic or comprehensive consideration of social
context and specificity. Instead, students are urged to pay attention to more
abstract categories and legal (rather than social) contexts, reflecting a quite