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Student Participation and Social Difference 199

other hand, all of the classes in the study retained a heavy focus on case analysis,
aimed at elucidating doctrinal issues. This is the backbone of the first-year law
school curriculum, and professors across all schools spent much of their time in
this kind of endeavor. All of the professors also took care at some points in their
teaching to push students into thinking practically about what these legal doctrines
would look like in the setting of making arguments or putting together cases in
court, and sometimes even in terms of dealing with clients. And there was actually
considerable discussion of theory and policy in some of the lower-ranked law school
classes, whereas at one of the more highly ranked law schools in the country, stu-
dents appeared to have less exposure to theory than did some of their counterparts
in the study at less prestigious schools. Students in this elite/prestige classroom did
complain about the relative dearth of theory, noting that it was not typical of their
overall education. But the counterpoint between their complaints and the enthu-
siastic invocation of theory by students at other, lower-ranked law schools serves
as a valuable caution to those who would assume too deterministic an effect of
school status:

[School 2: Elite/Prestige]

Student 1: I think I expected to spend more time on the “whys” of law [... ] and

that was surprising to me, how much time we actually spent explaining

and finding out the details of the doctrine rather than talking about the

justifications for the doctrine. [... ] When I was looking into law

schools, I specifically wanted to go to a school that would be more

theory-oriented and I was told that this school would be one of those

schools and just seems to vary from professor to professor.

[School 7: Regional/State]

Student 2: Well, contracts, I mean, [... ] there’s a whole- the whole history of

capitalism underlying it.

The students in the group from the regional law school went on to discuss in ani-
mated fashion the policy and social assumptions behind particular doctrines in
contract law and the evolution of contract law from its initial basic assumptions,
concluding that “the law kind of reflects how society is.” These students certainly
seemed no less entranced with (or capable of engaging with) the bigger picture
behind doctrine than did their more elite counterparts. It is certainly true that
students from less elite schools more frequently praised professors for remind-
ing them of what things would actually look like in practice, and one would not
want to deny some average differences among the students in terms of their
emphasis on theory versus practice. But these seem to be muted in the first-year
curriculum, where even the most elite students have to descend to the level of
doctrine when learning how to read cases, and where many professors across all
kinds of schools take time here and there to pull in the bigger picture of theory
and policy.
As we saw in our initial excerpt, the shadow of popular cultural pictures of
law school still looms large in the accounts of first-year law students, with a num-
ber of the interviewees making spontaneous comments about the frightening