On Becoming a Legal Person 121fronted her professor about whether salespeople had to be honest in negotiating
with customers:
Transcript 6.19 [1/7/9]Student: The salesperson tells you something that is completely opposite to // what //
Prof.: //At //
the auto parts store?
Student: At the auto parts store. I’m, you know, I like your voice or whatever--
Prof.: --not
my face anymore?
Class: [[laughter]]
Student: They do this, doesn’t tell you if there is no money back guarantee, or
anything like that. You got it, okay. And then the owner calls back, and
goes “Well, you know there’s a mistake,” but you’ve already written the
check, or whatever.
Prof.: Well, if he’s made an offer, he’s revoked it and unless 2-205 is going to
be applied, and there has to be a signed writing, unless you could argue
estoppel, if you’re dealing with the Code number 1-103, which opens
the doors to the common law, you don’t have that kind of protection,
unless it’s a consumer statute, or a federal trade regulation- regulation,
you don’t have that- that kind of protection.
Student: I.e., salespeople can lie?
Prof.: Huh? Not only, i.e., salespeople can lie, i.e., salespeople do lie, con-
stantly.
Student: That’s not fair.
Prof.: No, no. Fairness is not something that I accept as a general proposition,
and certainly not in my household.
Class: [[laughter]]The clear message here, as it is throughout the classes of this study, is that a legal
reading is primarily focused on what the law says you can or cannot do rather than
onwhat’s fair. This is simply an accurate rendition of the metalinguistic norms
surrounding a competent legal reading; professors may vary in their attitudes about
whether this is a good thing, and may even convey a distancing from this approach
at times through metalinguistic commentary or signaling, but they uniformly stress
this focus on layered textual authority. In the excerpt above, we see that the pro-
fessor in fact jovially embraces the tacit ethics (or lack thereof) involved in this kind
of approach. His response also models for students the nested series of textual re-
sources through which they should mentally check in answering a question such
as “Can a salesperson lie?” Just as medical training requires a hardening and dis-
tancing of students’ sensibilities from empathic reactions to death and human
bodies, legal training demands a bracketing of emotion and morality (as it is com-
monly understood) in dealing with human conflict and the people who appear in
legal conflict stories.