The Language of Law School This page intentionally left blank

[paragraph omitted]
As background to the instructions and the parties’ exceptions, we mention
certain facts as the jury could find them. The plaintiff was a professional entertainer,
and this was known to the defendant. The agreement was as alleged in the declara-
tion. More particularly, judging from exhibits, the plaintiff’s nose had been straight,
but long and prominent; the defendant undertook by two operations to reduce its
prominence and somewhat to shorten it, thus making it more pleasing in relation
to plaintiff’s other features. Actually the plaintiff was obliged to undergo three
operations, and her appearance was worsened.
If you have never read a legal opinion before, imagine how you would recount
what you have just read to someone. Quite frequently, those without legal training
focus on the story of the surgeon and the professional entertainer. By contrast, law
professors insistently focus students’ attention in a somewhat different direction.
In the following transcript segment, a professor questions a student about the case,
utilizing standard Socratic method teaching:
Transcript 4.2 [PS/1/1/1]
Prof.:
What errors were alleged in the appeal of 
Sullivan v. O’Connor
 () Ms.
[A.]
? () What errors were alleged in the appeal of 
Sullivan v. O’Connor
?
Ms. A.:
Um the defense claimed that um the judge failed in allowing the jury to
take into account for damages anything but a claim for out-of-pocket
expenses.

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54
Similarity
Prof.:
Well that’s a rather general statement. How did this get to the appellate
court?
Ms. A.:
Well the um the the patient was a woman who wanted // a //
Prof.:
// How // did this
case get to the appellate court?
Ms. A.:
The defendant disagreed with the way the damages were awarded in the
trial court.
Prof.:
How did this case get to the appellate court? The Supreme Court once
ah- I think this is true- they asked some guy who’d never argued a case
before the Supreme Court before, they said to him- he was a Southerner-
and they said to him ah “Counsel, how did you get here?” [[laughter]]
“Well,” he said, “I came on the Chesapeake and Ohio River.” 
((*imitated
Southern accent*))
 [[louder laughter]] How did this case get to the
supreme judicial court?
Ms. A.:
It was appealed.
Prof.:
It was appealed, you say. Did you find that word anywhere except in
(the) problem?
 [ + positive uptake]
Note that here we have yet another recontextualization of one portion of the origi-
nal written text from 
Sullivan v. O’Connor.
30
 This time the text excerpt is recon-
textualized in a classroom discussion, its new discursive context. If we were to tell
the story of this case, we might begin by talking about a woman, a professional en-
tertainer, whose nose was deformed during the course of plastic surgery by a phy-
sician who had promised to “enhance her beauty and improve her appearance.” In
her first response to the professor’s question, “How did this get to the appellate
court?,” Ms. A. attempts to recount this story: “Well the um the the patient was a
woman who wanted a- .” The professor, however, is after a different reading of the
case excerpt and immediately interrupts to repeat his question, “How did this case
get to the appellate court?”
31
In repeating the question, the professor in essence notifies the student that her
previous answer was on the wrong track. Linguists studying classroom speech have
analyzed this kind of response as an example of “zero-uptake” (or “nonuptake”).
“Uptake” in a question-and-answer sequence is measured by whether subsequent
questions incorporate any referential material from an immediately preceding
answer. Thus, if a professor, in framing a question, includes some reference to the
student’s previous answer, we would say that there is uptake. The subsequent ques-
tion takes up some portion of the previous answer, thereby indicating that the
questioner heard and took note of that answer. Repeating the original question is
perhaps the purest form of nonuptake possible, as it contains no referential ac-
knowledgment of any intervening answer.
32
From studies comparing high- and low-status elementary classrooms and
groups, we know that nonelite classrooms are more likely to involve authoritarian
control on the part of teachers, characterized by, for example, more frequent in-
terruption of children’s narratives, more frequent correction of perceived mispro-
nunciations, more emphasis on the text as something to be pronounced rather than
read for meaning, and, finally, less uptake.
33
 Uptake could be viewed as one mea-

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Learning to Read Like a Lawyer
55
sure of control, for even in very structured exchanges, a student whose answer is
acknowledged in subsequent questions is having some impact on the direction of
the conversation. However, a comparison of these studies with the law school ex-
ample demonstrates that the significance of uptake is highly contextual, so that a
straightforward reading of linguistic structure as an index of relative social power
is highly problematic. Understanding the social significance of discourse structure,
predictably, requires contextual analysis.
If we examine carefully several excerpts from law school classroom exchanges,
we see that, as in the lower-status elementary school reading group, the law school
discourse is predominantly characterized by nonuptake: