Epistemology and Teaching Styles 95taught in every classroom of the study. Students learn that the very construction
of the facts on which legal conflict stories are based involves legal filters: only
certain details will turn out to be legally accepted or relevant, and the determi-
nation of which details depends on the complex calculus of textual constraints
and metalinguistic warrants described earlier. The ability to decree the legal con-
struction of reality through delineation of facts gives legal language enormous, but
essentially invisible, power over social generalities. (And this power is expanded
further through the semiotics of policy discussions.) Legal categories are explicitly
matched with particular facts, so that students learn how to make a successful fit.
When courts make this match, new law is constantly being formed; thus, law both
emanates from and creates fact patterns. Professors also explicitly enunciate—or
bring students to enunciate—the backbone structure of legal principles shaping
the use of facts. In addition, professors point out the effects of legal procedure on
both fact construction and the development or application of law. Throughout,
and across a fascinating diversity of pedagogical styles, professors are conveying a
linguistic ideology centered on the crucial structuring role of layers of authority,
discernable in the text. Emotion, morality, and social context are semiotically
peripheralized in this process. At the same time, professors occasionally open up a
wide panorama of social and moral and personal stories that could arguably be
relevant to legal decisions at the fringes of the core legal reading. The lack of care-
ful analysis and substantiation in these wide-ranging discussions only furthers the
sense of legal power over social life. Although professors carefully marked bound-
aries between the different aspects of legal texts, they also at times encouraged
boundary crossing. When and how to blur boundaries among these components
of a legal reading itself becomes part of learning to read legal texts.
We have also specifically focused on the ways these facets of a legal reading
could be conveyed via quite different pedagogical means, from more heavily
lecture-oriented classrooms, through quasi-Socratic teaching, through classroom
discussion organized around shorter exchanges. Despite this diversity in form,
we saw that an identical set of strictures regarding reading legal texts is empha-
sized in all classes. These strictures focus attention on pragmatic warrants while
peripheralizing or erasing “extraneous” contexts such as social-historical settings,
emotions, and moral considerations. The result is a language that appears to be
able to effect a nearly universal translation of events, people, and actions into a
common language. This process renders disparate material equivalent or commen-
surable, but through the narrowed gaze of legal-textual warrants.
Thus, a core feature of U.S. legal epistemology, vividly visible in law school class-
rooms, is the new relationship created for legal readers with language and text. We
know things because this legal text says so, and we can only accept certain things as
important under this textual proof, while rejecting others. The overall linguistic frame-
work naturalizes and conceals any social, cultural, political, or ideological skewing,
hiding these kinds of influences behind the complex veil of intertextual layerings.
Susan Philips has analyzed the political implications of a hidden “intertextual gap”
between spoken and written law, demonstrating the ways this creates a function-
ally invisible opening for political maneuvering in courts.^13 In this chapter we have
seen how the same legal text could be read with different meanings, creating an