I
n a fashion that ought to please followers of Carol Gilligan, I began composing
the acknowledgments to this volume long before I started the book itself. This
was because I have at all points felt deeply how much the work depends on a web
of relationships, on the contributions of so many people to whom I feel profoundly
indebted. Before I attempt to do justice to this rich relational context, let me thank
two institutions, the American Bar Foundation and the Spencer Foundation, for
the generous funding that made this project possible. Some of the material from
Chapter 2 is reprinted by permission of The Yale Journal of Law and the Humani-
ties, Vol. 4, pp. 168–173; portions of Chapter 4 appeared originally in Natural
Histories of Discourse, edited by Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban (University of
Chicago Press, pp. 229–249; © 1996 by The University of Chicago. All rights re-
served). Chapter 6 contains material from Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory,
edited by Bambi Schieffelin, Kathryn Woolard, and Paul Kroskrity (pp. 149–162,
used by permission of Oxford University Press; © 1998 by Oxford University Press),
as well as material that is revised by permission from Democracy and Ethnography:
Constructing Identities in Multicultural Liberal States, edited by Carol J. Greenhouse
(The State University of New York Press, pp. 218–232; © 1998 by State University
of New York. All rights reserved). Thanks to the editors who worked on these
materials with me as well as to those who helped with articles to which I retained
copyright and from which I have drawn in this volume, which appeared in the
Journal of Legal Education 48(1): 1–87 (with Wamucii Njogu and Susan Gooding),
and the John Marshall Law Review 34(4): 91–117. I am also grateful to the many
colleagues—anonymous reviewers as well as many who are named below—who
have read and commented on parts of or all of the manuscript. Greg Matoesian
and Stewart Macaulay graciously provided thorough reviews of the linguistics and