On Becoming a Legal Person 103drafter and “accepter”—with an accompanying power to choose whichever out-
come it wants (deal/contract or no deal/no contract), is dramatized through this
imagined reported locution. It does not appear to matter that this is a company
rather than a person; legal personae are most importantly interlocutors occupying
various positions in a legally defined discursive interaction. When characterized
in this way, corporations become exchangeable with human beings, for both are
capable of speaking in the legal argument that is under way. Ever-Tite emerges,
then, as a character in the story who can speak, whose speech reveals the domi-
nance of strategic thinking, and whose position vis-à-vis written and spoken lan-
guage gave it a good location from which to strategize.
Immediately switching sides, the professor proceeds to consider the thoughts
of the people on the other side of this conflict, the Greens: “The Greens’ arguments
are really two, it seems to me. One: ‘Our offer expired. It lapsed. There’s nothing
out there to accept anymore. You waited too long.’ The court doesn’t buy that one.
Uh, two: ‘The offer’s still valid, but you haven’t accepted yet.’” Just as in the folk
ideology that equates legal education with learning to think like a lawyer, thought
and speech are here vividly intertwined, and thought is transparently enacted in
dialogic speech. This structure allows the professor to speak in the voices of the
Greens, imaginatively enacting now the opposite side of the conflict-laden dialogue
that he began in a previous turn. The student in this exchange (which occurs in
mid-November, after several months of classes) adopts a similar discursive strat-
egy: “Um, well, after showing up at the house, saying, ‘Okay, you can start.’” We
see that the student, as she imbibes the guidelines for making legal arguments, is
also adopting this feature of the form used by her professor; instead of simply de-
scribing what might have counted as commencement of performance (which in
this particular instance would probably have been the preferable response), she
attempts to enact it through reported speech.
On the one hand, direct quotation gives the semblance of reproducing speech
verbatim, as it actually occurred. A direct quotation purports to repeat an utter-
ance precisely as it would have been uttered, using the same verb tense, pronouns,
and other spatiotemporal (or, more technically, “deictic”) markers. Compare a
direct quotation, “She said, ‘I’m leaving now,’” with the equivalent indirect quo-
tation, “She said that she was leaving then.” In the indirect quotation, the speaker
changes the tense from present to past, the pronoun from “I” to “she,” and the
temporal adverb “now” to “then.” Linguistic scholars such as Bakhtin have ana-
lyzed this difference in terms of the relative penetration of the reporting speaker’s
speech framework into the reported speech.^10 It is certainly the case that the shift
to direct quotation carries with it a metalinguistic signal: the very maintenance of
tense, pronouns, and other deictics seems to tell the listener that the reported speech
is being reproduced precisely as it was spoken. This is obviously a more vivid ren-
dition, more dramatic and immediate, bringing the speaker and hearer imagina-
tively into the reported context itself. Conversely, the shifting of these same features
in indirect quotation overtly reminds the listener that this piece of speech is being
reported by someone who is not the same person (shift in pronoun), not speaking
at the same time (shift of verb tense and adverb), and perhaps not standing in the
same place (e.g., if there is a shift of spatial deictics).