98 Similarity
legal profession (and those studying or writing about it) to describe the essence of
law school training.^2 It represents, in a sense, a distillation of indigenous ideology, a
summary of how the process is viewed from within.^3 However, to unpack or analyze
this ideology, we find that we have to understand more than a mere acontextual
outline of cognitive processes. Instead, we must examine what it means to read or
talk like a lawyer, and this means that we are analyzing metalinguistic norms and
ideologies: we are looking at a new relationship with language that is created for
lawyers. As I have already argued, embedded in this new relationship is a hidden
epistemology, one with significant moral dimensions.
Numerous writers have commented on the ways that thinking like a lawyer
pulls law students away from altruistic, public interest goals.^4 Robert Granfield’s
study of legal education characterizes this change as a shift from a “justice-oriented
consciousness” to a “game-oriented consciousness.”^5 Being able to argue either side
of a case or to concoct a legal argument by “testing facts against... legal doctrine”
replaces concerns with substantive justice.^6 But it is through the filter of legal lan-
guage, written and spoken—as well as of metalinguistic structuring and ideology^7 —
that this change is effected. The change definitely includes these shifts to more
strategic, adversarial, and doctrinal approaches, but it is even more profound: it
alters how stories are constructed and read, which contexts are salient, how people
are categorized and conceived, how selves are constructed. In sum, there are en-
tirely new views of reality and authority, new landmarks and ways of speaking, al-
tered conceptions of themselves and others (and their relations to the world around
them) packed quietly into the reading lessons students encounter in the first-year
law school curriculum.
Metalinguistic structuring is performing powerful work here, carrying with it
tacit (and not so tacit) linguistic ideologies, not the least of which is a strong, al-
most isomorphic relationship implied between how people talk and how they think.
And so my conscious bracketing of the phrase “thinking like a lawyer” not only
indicates that it is a well-worn indigenous saying or adage, but that the saying it-
self glosses over the degree to which what is changing is as much how students read
and talk as how they think. Indeed, language operates as more than a filter here; it
not only mediates the shift in students’ perceptions, it is the stuff of which the
change is made, the backbone of the new legal approach they must learn if they are
to be fluent in the law.^8 When legally trained professionals speak of this alteration
as a sharpening of thought, they are often implying that it involves a honing of
general analytic ability rather than a shift into a very particular, culturally laden
kind of thinking and talking. This kind of approach may indeed be more demand-
ing than others as to some parts of the problem put before attorneys, but, as we are
seeing, it is most certainly less demanding as to other parts. The phrase “thinking
like a lawyer” is often used in a way that naturalizes this process, characterizing
lawyers as possessors of an overarching and superior analytic ability rather than as
experts in one profession’s specialized way of processing relevant information. Like
all professional epistemologies (and accompanying discourses), legal thought is
socially and institutionally grounded in specific practices and power relationships.
It asks some kinds of questions while neglecting others and makes sharp demands
for proof in some places where elsewhere it accepts unproven assumptions. The