116 Similarity
and procedural framing are established, or before moving into the serious and
systematic legal analysis, there is room for social specifics, framed as humor, place
setting, or courtroom strategy. The professor may mention in an aside that even if
doctrinal requirements have not been met, judges or juries may sometimes be per-
suaded by the particular circumstances of a case to overlook doctrinal difficulties,
perhaps to avoid manifestly unjust results. Alternatively, the professor may men-
tion in passing that social context or prejudice against certain kinds of people can
at times affect legal outcomes. When a case outcome seems to fly in the face of
prevailing legal doctrine, social context and emotion often emerge as wild cards
that can explain these apparent anomalies. In general, discussion of these sorts of
factors in the classrooms of this study rely on stereotyping and generalizations about
“kinds” of people or situations. Interestingly, there is often speculation about un-
derlying motivations packed into these discussions. The professors of this study
exhibited a considerable amount of variation in the degree to which they mention
such extralegal factors when discussing the people in legal texts. What all of the
professors shared was an insistent return to the core of a legal reading, using vari-
ous kinds of discursive markers to indicate the marginality of other factors.
IDENTITY AND SOCIAL CONTEXT
Consider, for example, the jump from ethnic stereotype to characterization of a
person and his motives in the following excerpt, all presented as ancillary to the
real guts of the legal reading under way:
Transcript 6.13 [5/10/2]Prof.: Mr. S. Is [student’s last name] Greek, by any chance?
Mr. S.: No, it’s Polish, sorry.
Prof.: All right.
Class: [[laughter]]
Prof.: Well, for the moment we’re going to assume that it’s Greek. Go on.
Class: [[laughter]]
Mr. S.: Okay, Mr. Ganas was a Greek and he uh was a waiter on-
Prof.: Is it significant that Mr. Ganas was a Greek?
Mr. S.: I don’t think it is. It shouldn’t be.
Prof.: Well, let’s decide which it is.
Class: [[laughter]]
Prof.: Is it significant, or is it that you think it shouldn’t be?
Mr. S.: Mmm (.) I think it shouldn’t, he shouldn’t- shouldn’t matter.
Prof.: It shouldn’t matter.
Mr. S.: No.
Prof.: What a wonderful, absolutely American perspective. Just like a World
War I movie. It shouldn’t matter, you suggest, where you come from. It