On Becoming a Legal Person 109ences between “genuine” dialogue, in which there are distinct voices, and a
mere question-answer adjacency pair form (which may or may not instanti-
ate differentiated voices). Silverstein would characterize the original Socratic
dialogues as actually a form of monologue: “Plato writes dialectic monologue
but distributes it to multiple participants, frequently in the form of adjacency-
pair structures like Question/Answer, or Remark/Counter-Remark.”^22 To the
extent that this is replicated in law school classrooms, Silverstein notes, the
discourse could be said to “inculcate a sense that legal dialectic is a procedure,
an algorithm of interrogation for generating Q-A pair part investigation of is-
sues-that-matter, seeking a telos.”^23
As noted previously (note 42 in Chapter 4), the smoothest instances of
Socratic questioning found in this study most closely approximate this “mono-
logue in the form of dialogue.”^24 However, as we have seen, there are many
sources of variation on this prototypical form. First, a number of the class-
rooms in the study use shorter, more informal exchanges, sometimes ap-
proaching almost conversational style, in unpacking the case law genre. This
varies from being an occasional feature of class discussion in the more formal
classes (often during policy discussions) to being a central organizing charac-
teristic of the classroom discourse. Second, the unruly student voices frequently
break out of the constricting frame of even the more tightly controlled Socratic
exchanges, so that we can identify genuinely independent footing and voice.
Third, at many points professors are attempting to teach students to take op-
posing positions in legal arguments; in these instances they are actually coach-
ing the students to create and occupy distinct voices (for example, through
role-playing). Finally, one fascinating feature of law school classroom discourse
is the ubiquitous use of reported speech to represent different perspectives or
voices, right alongside a frequent blurring of footing and elision of bound-
aries in the construction of the legal self. (The blurring of footing, of course,
relies on there being a distinction in the first place.)
Thus, we can distinguish a number of kinds of exchanges, all of which
might be characterized as Socratic: (a) monologue in pair-part form, produced
in exchanges between one or more students and the professor (the classroom
analogue, perhaps, of direct examination in the courtroom, where ideally at-
torney and client together construct one narrative through their question-
answer exchanges, keeping in mind that the actual performance often falls
interestingly short of the ideal);^25 (b) multiple kinds of two-part dialogue in
pair-part form (including one in which the professor and student respond to
one another in their own voices, and others in which professors and students
take on alternative voices or roles or make arguments, based on the exigencies
of legal argument; here, the closest legal analogue might be the dialogue be-
tween judges and attorneys during oral argument at the appellate level); (c)
discussions in which the class as a whole or multiple students chime in, either
mediated through the professor or (very rarely) unmediated, but nonetheless
using distinct voices (though generally this still occurs in pair-part structures);
and (d) an interesting interstitial category of coproduced speech in which the
professor acts much as a parent does when coaching a child who is not yet