On Becoming a Legal Person 131ideology about language, one that is part of the larger system to which law stu-
dents are being socialized, of the written texts they are being trained to read, and
of the way of speaking-and-thinking that their professors urge on them.
This language ideology stresses a transparency of metapragmatic form to so-
cial result. This is the case on several levels. Let us first consider the effect of role-
play, whether between professor and student or internally within professor turns
(when professors report the speech of various protagonists in dialogue with each
other, playing each role in turn). The metapragmatic form of at times coercive
dialogue is ideologically represented as transparent to the social result of a trans-
formed social identity (learning to think like a lawyer, conveyed through class-
room dialogue, being a crucial step on the way to becoming a lawyer). However,
metapragmatic form is also understood as transparent to the social results of cases
that are won by speakers able to hold up their end of similar dialogues—those who
are able to take on and speak roles fluidly.
“Taking a position” as an interlocutor in a dialogue is a necessary part of gain-
ing power for legal actors. This taking of a position is most vividly enacted through
role-playing, and it doesn’t matter which role is played as long as some role is played.
Professors take roles themselves, speaking for various characters in the cases and
even in legal philosophical texts, as they unfold a dialogic drama in classroom
speech. At times, professors also push students to take these roles themselves and
to play them with certainty. Lack of assurance, breakthroughs of genuine affect,
indexing through tone and gesture a failure to play the role, and silence are gaps in
the dialogue—or worse, refusals to acquiesce in the ongoing metapragmatic struc-
turing of discourse.
That structuring is a key ideological message of law school socialization. It
prepares students for a legal world that constantly effects a translation of people
into their roles (plaintiff, defendant) and actions into their legal categories (tort,
breach of contract). This translation occurs in a system in which either of two
opposing results is initially possible (guilty, not guilty) and in which effectual and
“correct” metapragmatic regimentation (in courts, in legal documents, in lawyers’
talk) yields powerful social results. A key presupposition of the legitimacy of those
results is the untying of the drama as legally translated from its usual social moor-
ings, the putative objectivity of the story once told in the apparently dispassionate
language of the law. As the people in the cases become parties (i.e., strategic actors
on either side of a legal argument), they are stripped of social position and specific
context, located in a geography of legal discourse and authority. Their gender, race,
class, occupational, and other identities become secondary to their ability to argue
that they have met various aspects of legal tests. These contextual factors do some-
times become salient to the discussions, but only as ammunition in just this way—
as fodder for metalinguistic legal filtering.
Thus, not only through the immediate modeling of role-play but in other
ways as well, we can say that the linguistic ideology of legal pedagogy represents
metalinguistic form as transparent at a third, even deeper level, for the meta-
pragmatic structure conveyed in law school classrooms also mirrors a broader
legal epistemology. This legal epistemology undergirds the U.S. legal system,
which derives its legitimacy in part from an act of translation of social events and