94 Similarity
simultaneous iconic and indexical features), but the message is imparted in all of
these classes, and often with some echoes of this Socratic mirroring of pedagogical
message in discursive form.^11
Summary
A shared message about legal reading is conveyed across diverse classrooms, pro-
fessors, and teaching methods. This is not surprising, for the students are being
trained to a common language: a new kind of reading, writing, and talking. The
tales of conflict that they might have read for plot, character, and moral are now
being dissected using new metalinguistic rules. In Chapters 4 and 5, I have delin-
eated the core structure and features of this new legal reading, concentrating on
the reading of cases across diverse classrooms.
In Chapter 4, we learned that professors reorient students’ gaze to the prag-
matic warrants that give legal texts authority. These warrants involve several kinds
of legal-textual lineages: the line of previous cases and other legal texts that a court
(or lawyers, or law students) can cite as authorities in deciding the case at hand,
and the procedural lineage of the case, traceable through opinions of lower courts,
the record in the case, and so forth. This new focus on pragmatic warrants is per-
haps most visible in the strict Socratic classroom, where the new structure of read-
ing is mirrored in the structure of classroom discourse.
However, the refocusing occurs in other kinds of classrooms as well. Even in
the classroom most heavily dominated by lecture, there are vestiges of a Socratic
teaching style, for example, the use of some dialogic structuring to convey the logic
of this new reading. This can occur either between professor and student or inter-
nally within the professor’s own turns, as he poses himself questions and answers
them. There is obviously nonetheless a vast difference in style between this class
and canonical Socratic method teaching. Yet despite this divergence, we find an
identical message conveyed about the structure of legal reading.^12
That structure relies on constant filtering of conflict stories through the lens
of legal-textual authority. We have now explored the fundamental aspects of this
kind of filtering. First, courts look to lines of precedent that provide legal genealo-
gies for the case before them, accepting or rejecting analogies to similar facts in
previous cases. An intricate set of metalinguistic understandings governs the pro-
cess of building analogies. As we’ve noted, courts also parse other kinds of relevant
legal texts: statutes, constitutions, administrative regulations, uniform codes (such
as the UCC), Restatements, and so forth. Second, courts consider the ways that
legal procedure, inscribed in legal documents, circumscribes which facts to accept,
which legal issues to address, and what kinds of conclusions can be reached. The
transition to a new legal reading pulls students away from referentialist approaches,
which treat the text as transparent and view its core meaning as its referential con-
tent. Instead, here the text is understood as a repository of power, whose core
meaning centers on legal-textual authority.
We have also taken a closer look at aspects of the metalinguistic filter through
which legal-textual authority is deciphered and constrained. These aspects are