132 Similarity
actors into their corresponding legal categories and roles. These categories and roles,
like the legal texts re-entextualized in new legal opinions, are always part of an op-
positional discourse in which one of two opposing parties, and interpretations, will
“win.” The linguistic ideology conveyed through this metapragmatic structure
pushes social context and emotion to the margins, except when they have been
abstracted and processed through legal categories (as, for example, with the con-
cept of “provocation” in criminal law).^37 Otherwise, emotion and context enter
only through the backdoor, as when the professor warns the students that the “eq-
uities” of the situation can skew legal results. (An example of this would be if a
legal requirement has not been strictly met, but the judge or jury finds for the party
anyway because of sympathetic feelings for an individual plaintiff.) Role-playing
in the classroom attempts to bring students to the level of actual people,^38 but the
specific roles that are played omit many of the social particulars that shape not only
normal social interactions themselves, but also moral assessments of those inter-
actions. The bracketing of social context, along with the translation of people and
events into legal categories and roles, is deemed to be a crucial way in which law
achieves objectivity and lawyers achieve dispassionate professional competence.
And, as we have seen, the means to this objectivity is through language: through
insistent dialogic exchange and questioning, taking each side, trying on different
positions and roles.
This removed approach to the person and to human conflict feeds into an
ideology of universal translatability in which legal language serves as a discursive
medium of exchange across all areas and levels of society.^39 In converting virtually
every possible event or conflict into a shared rhetoric, legal language generates an
appearance of neutrality that belies its often deeply skewed institutional workings.
The classroom experience initiates law students into this new language using an
approach that encourages them to push aside the emotional and socially embed-
ded particulars of the conflict. Instead, law professors direct their students’ atten-
tion to the oddly abstract conceptions of people and contexts provided by layered
readings of legal texts. The people in these landscapes, as well as the landscapes
themselves, are configured around points of legal argumentation, around strate-
gically structured dialogue. Students begin to learn a process of translation that
they will eventually take for granted. This legal translation is a key ground from
which they will operate when performing their role as lawyers; it embodies an epis-
temology that is the background grammar for all legal discussion.^40 When students
speak this language, they operate in a world in which important aspects of social
context and identity have become invisible. This is the phenomenon I refer to as
“cultural invisibility.” At the same time, other aspects of dominant culture and
assumptions become highly visible: the logic of capitalist exchange, for example,
in Contracts classes, and the focus on an abstract, strategizing individual as the
central figure in legal narratives. Thus, a cultural dominance for some aspects of
context accompanies a cultural invisibility for others. And so when professors trans-
late human conflict into this legal language, they drain away much of the sociocul-
tural specificity, along with many emotional and moral dimensions. In doing so,
they subtly erase a great deal of the context and detail on which most laypeople
would rely in forming ethical judgments. At the same time, they strongly insist that