0195182863.pdf

On Becoming a Legal Person 115

may be useful simply because- remember you may find that the rules are going to

differ depending on which category you’re in, okay? (3/3/6)

This succinctly summarizes how legal categorizations that emanate from rules
governing economic transactions can shape what will be foregrounded about
people’s identities in subsequent legal analysis.
At times, this abstract individual loses even the specificity of occupational
categories and becomes simply a buyer or seller, an offeror or offeree, a party to
the transaction:^30

Transcript 6.10 [3/3/6]

Student: Ah, the plaintiff, uh the buyer is suing the () seller.

Transcript 6.11 [1/9/5]

Student: I disagree. That- if the- it would be the offeree knew that the car was

burned up, the car was sold, or that the offeror had changed his mind

and said, “Hey, I’m not going to sell this”; if the offeree knew that, or

should have known that, I think that’s revocation of the offer.

Transcript 6.12 [5/24/21]

Prof.: No, he doesn’t have to buy the land, but if he does, he has to sell it to

the other party.

Here people and problems are located in and as individuals operating against the

odd acontextual context of a legal geography, two contracting parties interacting
with one another, even speaking in the first person singular (“Hey, I’m not going
to sell this”), against the backdrop of legal rights and doctrines. One wants to buy

something, the other wants to sell: except for (presumably reflexive unmarked usage
of) gendered pronouns, we have no sense of these actors as people beyond their

postulated attitudes toward property and their bargaining interaction with one
another. Just as initial medical school training moves students away from a per-
sonalized understanding of the human beings whose bodies they will treat, legal
education pushes law students to place people in legally crafted categories, using
abstraction to distance themselves from human dimensions of their clients’ prob-
lems. The medical student’s eye begins to narrow on anatomical parts and systems,
losing a view of the body as a person. Likewise, the law student’s vision locates
people involved in conflicts using categories that define them in terms of doctri-
nal and argumentative positions.

At the Edge of Legal Categories: Identity and Social Context,
Emotion and Morality

What about other aspects of identity, aspects often made central in nonlegal
storytelling? Readers might want to know about a person’s character or per-
sonality, emotions, social background or status, and many other culturally iden-
tifiable features. As we have seen, a legal reading has room for almost any facet
of social context or identity—but at the margins. After the basics of doctrinal