134 Similarity
features of these conflicts can direct attention away from grounded moral under-
standings, which some critics believe are crucial to achieving justice. Moreover,
this step out of social context and emotion provides the law with a cloak of appar-
ent neutrality, which can conceal the ways that law participates in and supports
unjust aspects of capitalist societies. This approach also gives the appearance of
dealing with concrete and specific aspects of each conflict, thereby hiding the ways
that legal approaches exclude from systematic consideration the very details and
contexts that many would deem important for making just moral assessments.
As a result, the alienation experienced by some law students during legal train-
ing may be an unavoidable consequence of a process in which increasingly instru-
mental and technical appeals to legal authority blunt moral and context-sensitive
judgment. Such technical appeals lie at the heart of U.S. legal epistemology and
are an important part of the legal system’s very legitimacy. As we have seen, the
people and landscapes that result from this new legal approach to reading and
composing conflict stories are defined by their positions in legal arguments, con-
stituted in and through dialogue. Taking a step back from any emotional response,
the legal reader uses question-answer pair-parts to create a discursive distance that
nonetheless allows him or her to simultaneously actually enter into the conflict as
well, standing in the shoes of the people involved. Just as legal translation into
putatively objective categories gives the legal system a veneer of legitimacy, the
ability to take either position in this ongoing dialogue also conveys a sense of ob-
jectivity and fairness. All points of view are ostensibly under consideration; all sides
of the conflict will be given voice. In this sense, role-playing and question-answer
dialogic form are features of the metapragmatic regimentation of discourse that
takes institutionalized ideology to the heart of the speaking that constitutes the legal
arena. As Matoesian^45 has noted, domination is well concealed and indeed natu-
ralized through metalinguistic ideology and structure in legal settings, and the law
school classroom offers a prism through which to see this process in action.
In her study of the language of judges, as we’ve already noted, linguistic an-
thropologist Susan Philips also stresses the role of legal discourse in naturalizing
and concealing the enactment of politics and power in court:
The judges in this study are conscious to varying degrees of the ideological dualisms
and oppositions identified in legal, political, and everyday control ideologies. But it
is striking that ideology and conflict are most acknowledged where they are consid-
ered peripheral. Ideological conflict is displaced from the political and legal into the
everyday “nonlegal” discussion of courtroom control in a way that furthers the im-
age of the law as ideologically monolithic.^46There is an obvious parallel here to the way professors acknowledge the potential
impact of racism or politics on legal decisions, but push it to the margins of discourse.
Philips also demonstrates that judges vary systematically, by political orientation, in
how they approach hearing guilty pleas. However, they characterize what they do in
the courtroom as above politics, as legal and professional: “Judges in fact repudiate
the enactment of political ideology in their courtroom behavior.”^47 Politics are at once
enacted in the metalinguistic structure of courtroom discourse and concealed through
the fiction that this discourse is “legal” rather than “political.”