126 Similarity
by characteristic linguistic features. For example, the routine is usually but not
always initiated by an imperative verb form meaning ‘say’ or ‘do,’ followed by the
utterance to be repeated.”^33 The modeling of correct language use in the Socratic
routine above, then, invokes one of the more powerful linguistic socialization tech-
niques available in the human repertoire. There is a particularly apt comparison
between this kind of law school exchange and the routines used to socialize Kaluli
children.^34 The exchange in this transcript is also a marked example of what con-
versation analysts call “repair,” in which the professor is inviting (indeed, order-
ing) the student to correct a prior response.^35 This seemingly banal invitation to
repair, and other, more subtle versions of it throughout these classrooms, actually
contains a correlative invitation to reformulate the self of the student into whose
mouth new words are put. This new self is first and foremost a “black belt” of legal
argument, distanced and separated from the emotional, socially situated personal
or nonprofessional self. This separation is subtly reinforced through multiple as-
pects of classroom discursive form, including elevation of argumentative position-
ing as a top priority for legal speakers, an insistence on primacy of legal filters for
making sense of legal stories and characters, the ubiquitous elision of footing, and
frequent use of role-playing.
During role-playing exchanges, professors push students into new concep-
tualizations of the person by literally placing them in the shoes of legal personae,
demanding that they speak in this new voice. In these exchanges, the socializa-
tion process comes still closer to home for students. Here, in a sense, the devel-
opment of legal personae for students becomes more personal, for they are asked
not only to describe people in certain terms, but to imagine themselves as those
people, to speak in their voices. And because of the elision of footing often found
in these exchanges, the boundary between those other voices and a student’s own
voice blurs. The strategic arguer who is the buyer/plaintiff speaks in the same
voice as the plaintiff’s attorney, and in the same voice as the student articulating
(animating? authoring?) the possible arguments in light of the array of available
discursive positions. The scenarios can be derived from the actual events of cases
the students read or from hypotheticals created by the professor; the difference
becomes unimportant as parallels in argumentative positioning are foregrounded.
At the same time, emotion and morality become background, mobilizable to the
degree that strategic interests demand.
We have already seen a number of examples of role-playing in previous tran-
script excerpts. Recall that in Transcript 6.5, the professor places the student in
the role of an interlocutor in an exchange between legal parties and a fierce judge,
culminating in a shift where the student admonishes himself in the judge’s voice.
In Transcript 4.13, the student is placed near the top of a flagpole as the professor
cruelly revokes an offer at the last minute. Transcript 4.19 found a professor speak-
ing in the voice of an employer, inviting the students in the class into the role of
employees. As we will see in the rest of this chapter, role-playing in law school class-
rooms repeatedly locates students in a new legal landscape, where the important
compass points are features of discourse. In the process, the students themselves
move out of accustomed frames to speak in the voices of personae defined by the
demands of that legal discourse. In the following exchange, a professor is appar-