206 Conclusion
of information needed to create analogies in legal-textual frameworks. In the
process, legal reasoning gains an appearance of ubiquitous, indeed, promiscu-
ous engagement with social particulars, while building a core that is virtually
impervious to grounded social analysis. As Schlegel points out, this creates an
uneasy paradox in which courts must all the time make decisions about issues
that they are incapable of thoroughly grasping. Worse, it is possible that the sys-
tem of legal language hides from them even the truth of their own limitations.
At the same time, traditional outsider students continue to be differentially si-
lenced in the prototypical law school classroom, blocking one of many potential
routes by which alternative understandings of social contexts and norms could
enter the mainstream legal conversation. As such routes are closed in the course
of legal education, nascent lawyers learn an increasingly closed discourse, wid-
ening the gap between themselves and their future clients.