6

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On Becoming a Legal Person:

Identity and the Social Context

of Legal Epistemology

97

I

n the previous chapter, we saw that a distinctive approach to reading written

legal texts is inculcated in law school classrooms. Reading like a lawyer turns out

to be an essential ingredient in the transformation to thinking like a lawyer. And,
of course, the way that professors determine whether students are learning to read
like lawyers throughout the semester is by assessing how they talk about legal texts.

In this chapter we move further into an analysis of the transformative process in
first-year law school classrooms, turning now to ask about the contours of the legal

personae revealed in talk about legal texts and about the spaces these people in-
habit. In other words, what kind of people are revealed and created through legal
readings—not only the people in the texts, but also the speakers in the classrooms?
And what are the points of reference, the landscapes, within which they operate?
We will find that as students shift to thinking like lawyers, they at times speak from
an analytical distance, while at other times they actually stand in the shoes of new,
legal personae. As students and professors speak from these positions, we can dis-
cern the outlines of a distinctively legal drama, with its own characters and set-
tings made real as they are discussed and enacted in law school settings. In this
chapter, we focus more carefully on metalinguistic features such as reported speech,
footing, framing, role-play, deixis, and pronomial usage to understand this pro-
cess in detail.
Using this approach, I delineate a somewhat different, more complicated under-
standing of the law school process than is usually indicated by those who character-
ize it as learning to think like a lawyer.^1 Although I will not constantly use quotation
marks to mark this particular framing of the concept “thinking like a lawyer,” I would
ask that this more complex understanding of the phrase be assumed wherever it
appears in my text. First, this has long been an established catchphrase used by the