120 Similarity
examples, there is no attempt to hide or deny the possible effects of racial or ethnic
identity on legal outcomes; indeed, any such attempt might risk rendering the sys-
tem implausible. Instead, there is a fascinating combination of a complete willing-
ness to accept the impact of social identities on case results, with an ongoing evasion
of any systematic inclusion or analysis of those impacts. Where a social science class
would focus on the ways we can trace or know about such impacts, law school train-
ing reserves certainty for the core story uncovered through legal readings and dis-
cursive practices. At the same time, random social and other aspects of people’s
identity dance freely at the margins. Perhaps people’s race or social situation affected
the outcome; probably they do sometimes. But we really can’t know for sure. We
can speculate as freely as we like, developing likely scenarios, imagining possible
motives. And then we must return to the core aspects of a person’s identity in any
legal story: those features defined by the relevant legal doctrine or procedure (off-
eror or offeree? plaintiff or defendant?). We do not ask whether someone is a gener-
ally reliable person. We ask whether she or he showed up at the time and place
specified in the contract, and with the goods as agreed upon. We ask whether some-
one precisely mirrored a contractual offer in accepting it, not whether he or she has
dreams of being a novelist. We may ask about the relative power the two parties had
in making a contractual bargain, but that inquiry will be very narrowly circumscribed
by the legal definition of what an unconscionable contract is; we will not, for example,
conduct a sociological examination of the way race, class, gender, educational back-
ground, the structures of neighborhoods or companies or the capitalist economy, or
a number of other factors may impact power. Social identity and context do some-
times enter contract doctrine, but in broad categories: consumers versus merchants,
for example. Even when race or gender becomes relevant, as they do in constitutional
law, they are extracted from particular social contexts and personal histories, and once
again, a legal reading will require that people step back from the usual coordinates
by which such identities are understood and look instead to the doctrinal catego-
ries.^31 It should be noted that in the realm of Contracts teaching, there is one ap-
proach that might yield a somewhat different picture, and that is the “relational
contracts” approach. This approach attempts to focus on the relational matrix sur-
rounding contractual relations, and thus tends to give social analysis a more system-
atic place in legal discourse.^32
EMOTION AND MORALITY:ROLE-PLAY,LINGUISTIC IDEOLOGY,
AND THE LEGAL SELF
We have seen that legal pedagogy pushes students to read for the metapragmatic
structuring of text and authority, as well as the discursive positions of legal perso-
nae. These moves toward more pragmatic readings of texts, and translations of
people’s stories, generally require students to suspend, at least temporarily, their
judgments about the emotional or moral aspects of events. Whether someone was
right or wrong, moral or immoral, reprehensible or ethical is not part of the cen-
tral structure of this pragmatic (and metapragmatic) approach to reading. If emo-
tion and morality become relevant, they will only do so through the carefully filtered
reading yielded by doctrine, procedure, and strategy. In one class, a student con-