Learning to Read Like a Lawyer 83At the same time, a very stringent set of guidelines for unpacking legal texts is
conveyed, through overt instruction but also through a subtle redirection of atten-
tion. As students tell and listen to the facts, they begin to notice different aspects of
the conflict story encompassed in the written case law text. As they apply facts to law,
they learn rules for building appropriate analogies between cases. These rules are as
often gleaned from the way a professor retells the story, or redirects discussion to
students who are on the right track, as from explicit admonitions. Professors also
clarify the law to be applied, pushing students to identify the tests and standards to
be found in lines of cases (or statutory language). At times, the limiting structure of
legal procedure becomes a focus as well, when professors remind students of the ef-
fects of procedure on the establishment of facts or on the overall stance of the case.
It is only when the professor is sure that students know how to package the events in
question into these narrow legal boxes that classes engage in wide-ranging policy
discussions. These discussions open the door to a variety of social and moral issues,
which can be connected with some freedom to the legal questions at hand; however,
the class has now exited the core legal analysis.
Thus, at two levels, a legal reading appears to be capable of translating virtu-
ally any event or concern. First, any events involved in a conflict that winds up in
a legal forum can be translated as facts fitting into the narrow categories of a legal
reading, whether they involve the building of a church, agreements among family
members as to the care of an ailing relative, disputes between manufacturers and
buyers, franchisers and franchisees, and on and on. Second, discussions of policy
that surround these readings permit legal readers to speculate on almost any social
or moral aspect of the situation involved. Thus, a legal reading combines a nearly
universal translating mechanism with a narrowing filter that sharply constrains
which factual details and which policy concerns can actually affect legal outcomes.
This focus is profoundly metalinguistic in character: it runs events as well as social
and moral concerns through a complex filter structured around the interrelation
of precedential texts, text-based analogies, repetition of key phrases and terms from
text to text, and layers of legal authority relayed through and in layered legal texts.
Although professors may vary in how they convey these facets of legal reading, we
can nonetheless trace the same basic approach across all of the classes in the study.