On Becoming a Legal Person 113judge—are generally summarizable in a single sentence. As we will see below, out-
side the precision of this legally defined frame, students are free to imagine what-
ever attributes they want to in speculating about characters in legal dramas, just as
they are encouraged to freely imagine the policy implications and social contexts
surrounding the cases they read. Additionally, through the process of character-
ization in legal training, law students become increasingly comfortable with the
elision of animator, author, and principal footings as they prepare for a career in
which they must put words into people’s mouths without too obviously appear-
ing to do so. We have already seen that this involves speaking in the voice of par-
ties to the case, creating characters in a drama, in addition to characterizing those
people in particular ways. Later in this chapter, we will return to the question of
how role-play of this kind influences the conceptualization of people and self con-
veyed to students through legal education.
ECONOMIC MAXIMIZERS AND STANDARD AVERAGE FARMERS:
READING PEOPLE THROUGH DOCTRINAL CATEGORIES
We turn now to those aspects of a legal reading, as it is taught in these class-
rooms, that frame people in more doctrine-specific ways, ways that may in large
part be responsive to the subject matter of Contracts classes. These are the char-
acterizations that focus on people as economic maximizers—or that empha-
size their occupational or other economic roles. As I mentioned earlier, the
successful exportation of economic models across doctrinal areas has meant
that these kinds of characterizations are unlikely to be limited to Contracts classes
or to other classes dealing with more obviously economic domains (e.g., Corpora-
tions or other business law classes). Perhaps, given the analysis in the previous sec-
tion, this is not surprising: a general legal understanding of people as strategic, as
maximizing their position in a legal argument, has some obvious affinities with a
view of people as economic maximizers.
A great deal of the doctrinal framework in the field of contracts centers on the
issue of economic exchange, on bargains and business transactions. Thus, charac-
ters in the conflict stories told in Contracts classes are frequently identified in terms
of their occupations or economic positions. In the following excerpt, the profes-
sor draws on a common stock figure in contracts tales: the “standard average”
farmer who must decide about whether to breach a contract based on various stra-
tegic considerations:
Transcript 6.6 [8/10/18]Prof.: All right. If you think about what we’re worried about is, on the one
hand, the farmer is going to go out there as soon as the price rises, all
right, make more money off his wheat, all right, thinking that he’ll be
hedged, all right, he’s trying to make a profit out of his wheat, okay.
And I suppose in that particular case, what might the farmer be hoping,
assuming that- and this is part, my problem when I start talking like
this. I have a problem with it because, of course, I’m assuming the
farmer- that the farmer will know the law, all right, but in fact, you