Professorial Style in Context 173last three categories, whereas, as we’ve seen, none of the judges in the more rule-
based categories lacked legal education. Some of the women in the mediators cat-
egory had had legal training. Although we obviously do not want to read too
essentialist a meaning into these findings, it is interesting that a confluence of gen-
der, race, and status/training appears to correspond roughly with a patterning of
discourse in the Conley and O’Barr study, and arguably in my study as well. In both
cases, white men with the most elite training are distinguished from the other sub-
jects in the study. Clearly, even if this pattern were to be substantiated in broader
studies, we would expect that there would be exceptions; in any case, we need fur-
ther research to accurately parse the combination of discursive and social/contex-
tual features at work.^43
I raise this issue simply to point to the as yet largely unstudied differences we
may find based on subtle differences among law teachers, individual classes, and
law schools. For example, as we’ve noted, in the 1970s Shaffer and Redmount pub-
lished a study finding that the discourse in three Indiana law schools was heavily
oriented toward lecture. Although again, I would not wish to draw any sweeping
conclusions from this coincidence, the class in our study with the heaviest lecture
component was a regional law school in the Midwest. I point this out not to sug-
gest any heavy-handed conclusions regarding geography and law school teaching
styles, but merely to raise the point that there are many factors to consider in at-
tempting to discern patterning. Along with status of the law school in which the
class is taught, we can ask about other aspects of the law school (school culture,
location, history, etc.) and about the gender, race, age, background, and other fea-
tures of the professor and students involved. In addition, the discursive environ-
ment in the class itself can obviously have a role to play.
Summary
In this chapter, we reviewed differences in teaching style across the classrooms in
this study, with a focus more on divergences than on similarities. Although some
aspects of dialogic structure can be found across all of the classrooms, we have seen
some dramatic differences in the degree of professorial control of class discussion.
These correspond to divergences in the degree to which professors employ lecture,
extended Socratic questioning, and shorter exchanges. We concluded the chapter
by asking whether there was any discernable social patterning that might explain
the distribution of these divergences in style. We do see some indications that any
patterning corresponds more with where professors were trained than where they
are currently teaching. Having examined possible connections between discourse
and social variation among the professors, we turn now to examine these kinds of
patterns in student’s classroom discourse.