Legal Language and American Law 215Woolard and others, “makes a promising bridge between linguistic and social
theory.”^28 As have linguistic anthropologists working in other settings, I, too, have
found that linguistic ideology forms a crucial organizing backbone for ongoing
linguistic interaction and socialization. Michael Silverstein notes that
any indexical process, wherein signs point to a presupposed context in which they
occur (i.e., have occurred) or to an entailed potential context in which they occur (i.e.,
will have occurred), depends on some metapragmatic function to achieve a measure
of determinacy or textual coherence.... It turns out that the crucial position of ide-
ologies of semiosis is in constituting such a “default” mediating metapragmatics....
In short, ideology construes indexicality by constituting its metapragmatics.... Ide-
ologies present invokable schemata in which to explain/interpret the meaningful flow
of indexicals.^29In socializing law students to a new ideology of language and text, law professors
accomplish a profound reorientation in the initiates’ very processing of the “flow
of indexicals” that is the foundation of communication. Thus, the role of language
ideology as a backbone is particularly highlighted in this setting by the specific role
that language plays in legal epistemology.
As we have seen, there is an unusually central role for linguistic ideology in
law school socialization, because it is in and through manipulations of language
that nascent attorneys learn to wield the special power of their profession. Proper
application of the legal tests and categories, gleaned from a proper legal reading of
written legal texts, is the foundation on which legally trained professionals draw in
claiming authority. Thus, the linguistic ideology that undergirds legal training
orients students’ attention to layers of legal-textual authority. There is no need to
claim that we will generate factual accuracy (in the usual sense) from such a read-
ing, for the core compass orienting the reader remains “what the court, or legisla-
ture, said”—and then, in turn, what the position of that court or legislature was in
the hierarchy of legal text generators. What we accept as true for the purposes of
making a legal decision may not conform accurately to what happened, but that is
rarely a matter of concern; once a court has met certain threshold requirements (it
has jurisdiction to decide the matter, its decision was not clearly erroneous, etc.),
it has the performative power to find facts. Thus, the legal reader’s task is not to
uncover what actually happened (more usually the mandate of the social scien-
tist), but to correctly discern the facts as found by the authoritative court. These
facts, read through a filter of doctrinal language also extracted from written legal
texts, must then be sorted out in a way that permits the building of analogies.
To accomplish this requires a reading focused on layers of authoritative lan-
guage and oriented by linguistic ideology. This linguistic ideology equates the
proper alignment of language with authoritative legal knowledge, and thus also with
proper application of the law. Legal epistemology rests on linguistic processes:
expert deciphering of written legal texts, appropriate use of analogies and concomi-
tant legal-linguistic frames, making arguments within these frames, ability to speak
in the various voices and from the various stances required to argue effectively
(sometimes to anticipate your opponent’s argument, sometimes to make an argu-
ment for your client, or, if you are a judge, to weave between alternative positions