- Actually, to put it in more technical terms, the argument is that there is an
“iconic” or mirroring “fit” between the two. And because the discursive form of the Socratic
method uses contextual (metapragmatic) structuring to create this fit, there is also an “in-
dexical” link. In Chapter 4, I explain how classroom discourse is an “indexical icon” of the
legal discourse to which it trains students; at the same time, there is a kind of “iconic in-
dexical” character to the classroom metapragmatics. - See Smith, Cognitive Styles; Zemans and Rosenblum, Making of a Public Profes-
sion, 57. - E. G. Gee and Jackson, “Current Studies.”
- Zemans and Rosenblum, Making of a Public Profession, 136. A number of stud-
ies found that lawyers viewed general and practical skills as most essential in practice; these
were the very skills that they felt were most lacking in their law school education. - Garth and Martin, “Law Schools”; see also Martin and Garth, “Clinical Educa-
tion as a Bridge.” - Garth and Martin, “Law Schools,” 508.
- See Kimball and Farmer, “Comparative Results”; Lorenson, “Concentrating on a
Single Jurisdiction”; see also studies cited in Teich, “Research on American Law Teaching.” - Bryden, “What Do Law Students Learn?”
- Philips, “The Language Socialization of Lawyers.”
- Conley and O’Barr, Just Words; Hirsch, Pronouncing and Persevering; Matoesian,
Reproducing Rape; Philips, Ideology. See Brenneis, “Language and Disputing”; Mertz,
“Legal Language” and “Language, Law, and Social Meanings” for overviews of this area of
research. - For example, although Matoesian documents the ways legal discourse reinforces
patriarchal norms, he also demonstrates how rape victims can fight back within the frame-
work of legal language. Matoesian, Law and the Language of Identity. Conley and O’Barr
painstakingly trace the linguistic features that render language relatively more “powerful”
or “powerless” and connect this with larger patterns in which litigants use more “rules-
oriented” versus “relational” discourse. Conley and O’Barr, Rules versus Relationships.
Although they do empirically demonstrate the preference for rules in legal discourse, they
also provide a nuanced picture of how this varies among judges, so that language remains
a partially independent level requiring separate analysis. See also Briggs, Disorderly Dis-
course. In this regard, scholars of language and law fit into a long line of scholarship in
legal anthropology, which has for some time painted a rich picture of the role of law in
societies. Jane Collier’s early ethnographic work, for example, traced how legal categories
used by the Zinacantecos had a logic of their own but also were affected by wider Mexican
state institutions. Collier, Law and Social Change. Sally Falk Moore famously character-
ized this kind of social field, in which we can find both autonomous and nonautonomous
dimensions, a “semi-autonomous” social field. S. F. Moore, “Law and Social Change.”
Moore’s later work on “customary law” on Kilimanjaro provided an exemplary ethno-
graphic account of this kind of mixed dynamic as it transmutes through historical change.
S. F. Moore, Social Facts and Fabrications. - See Briggs, “Notes on a Confession.” Here we can again point to a long tradi-
tion in anthropology of research on the imposition of hegemony through law, from Laura
Nader’s germinal work through that of scholars such as Jean and John Comaroff. Nader,
No Access to Law and The Life of the Law; Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revo-
lution, vols. 1 and 2; see also Coombe, The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties; for over-
views, see S. F. Moore, Law and Anthropology; Goodale and Mertz, “Anthropology of Law.” - Hirsch, Pronouncing and Persevering, 90; Philips, “Local Legal Hegemony”; see
also Briggs, “Notes on a Confession.”
238 Notes to Pages 28–29