Entering the World of U.S. Law 3

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Entering the World of U.S. Law

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uch has been written about the first year of law school. There have also been

many attempts to define core aspects of U.S. legal reasoning. This book

considers these two issues together, using a study of the initial law school expe-
rience to shed light on legal worldviews and understandings. One focus of this
research is the content of U.S. legal epistemology (i.e., distinctively legal ways

of approaching knowledge), as revealed in the training of initiates into the
world of law. The study uses close analysis of classroom language to examine the

limits that legal epistemology may place on law’s democratic aspirations. It also
asks whether legal training itself may impact the democratization of the legal
profession—that “public profession”^1 that figures so prominently in the govern-
ing of our country.
An important corollary of this focus on language as the window to legal epis-
temology is the central role of discourse to law and other sociocultural processes.
In particular, the ideas that people hold about how language works (linguistic ide-
ologies) combine with linguistic structuring to create powerful, often unconscious
effects. In recent years, linguistic anthropologists have made much progress in
developing more precise analytic tools for tracking those effects.^2 In addition to
studying spoken discourse, they have turned their attention to the impact of writ-
ten texts on social interactions in ritual and institutional settings. This book uses
linguistic anthropological analysis to uncover the ways microlevel processes in lan-
guage embody and perpetuate powerful linguistic ideologies. These ideologies struc-
ture and reflect the social uses of language and text in legal contexts, and thus, I
argue, provide a key foundation for “thinking like a lawyer.”^3 In this sense, one
thinks like a lawyer because one speaks, writes, and reads like a lawyer. Some would
associate thinking like a lawyer with superior analytic skills in a neutral sense; I