170 Difference
teaching my students [... ] I think the subject is fabulous. I think it’s fabulous
because [... ] of the significance of contract as, um, one of the basic social struc-
tures of everybody’s lives [... ]” (Interview 3). This precise sentiment was echoed
by one of the elite law school professors in her interview as well. Indeed, in many
cases, professors would proceed at points in their interviews to launch enthusias-
tically into explanations of specific aspects of contract law doctrine pertinent to
the discussion. In this sense, the language and logic of the case law assigned to the
students, and of contract law in particular, shared center stage for these teachers
across all of the schools of the study, both in terms of their own self-representa-
tions and in terms of the discussions in their classes.
Another interesting similarity that we have seen among the classes is the pres-
ence of a kind of backbone of dialogic structure, even in classes occupied mostly
by professor lecture. Whether in this latter case, or in the case of the short-exchange
classes, or in the modified Socratic classes, we could outline most of the classes using
a pair-part structure, one that only very rarely (predominantly in the more con-
versational short-exchange classes) gives way to any alternative discursive format.
And although this pair-part structure occasionally instantiates something resem-
bling a monologue, we have also seen the ubiquity of multivoiced exchanges in these
classrooms—frequently dialogues, often posed as an exchange between opposing
voices. We could analyze the metalinguistic ideology conveyed and encoded by the
ubiquity of dialogic structure in a number of ways. First, like the semantic content
of many class discussions, which is often organized around exploring two oppos-
ing arguments, this discursive structure conveys a sense of legal reasoning as fun-
damentally dialogic: the thought, mirrored precisely in the discourse, emerges from
a constant conversation between two distinct positions. Professors convey this even
in lectures, as they first pose and then answer questions and as they question the
case first from one point of view and then another. In a functionalist mode, one
could point to the fit between this and a number of discursive features of legal
practice, most notably the question-answer structure used with witnesses in court,
by judges in dealing with attorneys both in appellate oral argument and elsewhere,
and even by attorneys when dealing with clients. Written legal opinions, which
attorneys must be able to parse, generally encompass and discuss two or more dif-
fering stances both toward the events in question and the law to be applied, often
posing one against the other in the course of explicating the court’s decision. In
this study, I have also suggested a more profound metalinguistic message conveyed
by this focus on textual and linguistic structures: an unmooring of fixed norma-
tive stances in favor of this discursively based fluidity, which focuses on linguistic
authority and argument.
If the classes shared an emphasis on legal doctrine, with some differentiation
around the edges in terms of how much time is spent discussing theoretical issues,
then we can ask whether there are any other possible points of differentiation among
teachers based on school status. Although the classes all share some kind of back-
bone of dialogic or at least dialectical structuring, we have also seen that there are
some considerable differences among them in terms of overall discourse structure.
One possibility is that they differ by school status along lines of discourse style,
with perhaps classes in the higher-ranked schools staying closer to the traditional