4 Introduction
would instead characterize the acquisition of lawyerly “thinking” as an initiation
into a particular linguistic and textual tradition found in our society.
To develop a detailed picture of the epistemology and process of legal train-
ing, I obtained tapes and observational notes from a full semester of Contracts
classes in eight different law schools. The law schools range in status from “top five”
to “local” law schools; the professors were diverse in terms of gender, race, and
legal training. Observers (including myself) taped and coded the interactions in
these classes throughout the first semester of law school. Coders then worked with
full transcripts of the tapes and in-class observational notes to quantify aspects of
the turns in each class. They also qualitatively assessed aspects of developing class-
room dynamics. The overall results provide our first detailed observational data
on racial dynamics in law school classrooms; they also are the first to allow com-
parisons across a full range of diverse law schools. Although there has been more
observational study of gender dynamics in law school classrooms than of race,
previous studies of gender did not use methods that permitted fine-grained analy-
ses of aspects of talk in classrooms beyond broad tallying of numbers of turns.
Working from transcripts, we have been able to track both differences and simi-
larities among a broad range of law school classes. A combination of qualitative
and quantitative methods allows us to explicate in detail the language of U.S. law
as it is taught in diverse law schools.^4
The first part of this chapter presents, in summary form, the core argument of
the book. The second part takes the reader inside the law school classroom, sketch-
ing more concretely the kind of discourse found in U.S. law teaching. Our focus is
on the very first semester of law school, when students are initiated into a new way
of thinking and talking about the conflicts with which they will be asked to deal as
attorneys.
Legal Epistemology and Law Teaching
Although much of this book deals with the nuances and complexities of analyzing
U.S. legal language, its central conclusions can be stated in seven relatively simple
propositions:
- There is a core approach to the world and to human conflict that is per-
petuated through U.S. legal language. This core legal vision of the world and of
human conflict tends to focus on form, authority, and legal-linguistic contexts
rather than on content, morality, and social contexts. We can trace this view
through close analysis of the content and structure of the language found in
law teaching and written law texts, as law professors inculcate this distinct
approach and as law students learn to speak it. In the law school classroom,
initiates to the legal profession take their first steps into a world in which the
linguistic processes of combative dialogue and textual exegesis substitute for
substantive, socially grounded moral reasoning. - This legal worldview and the language that expresses it are imparted in
all of the classrooms studied, in large part through reorienting the way students
approach written legal texts. This reorientation relies in important ways on a subtle