man of color. The teacher, himself trained in an elite school, was in his midthirties and
had been teaching for more than five years. Like the other short-exchange classes, this
class did include traditional Socratic features, including some use of the traditional
method of calling on students (using formal address) to discuss the day’s assigned cases.
However, there was also fairly regular rupturing of this formality, with students break-
ing in to ask questions. This was one of the two most racially diverse classrooms in the
study, with 24.0% students of color: 8.1% Asian American and 10.5% African American
students. The percentage of Latino students (4.4) was slightly below the national aver-
age. In terms of gender, the class was slightly below the national average, with 40.7%
women (placing it at the low end of the middle range in terms of classrooms included in
this study).
Class #8, also in an elite/prestige law school, was the smallest in the study, with only
32 students. The teacher, a woman of color, was in her early forties and had been teaching
more than ten years. A highly informal class, it was also by far the most diverse in the study,
with 46.9% students of color: 12.5% African American and 21.9% Asian American stu-
dents. But the percentage of Latino/a students (3.1) was actually below the national aver-
age. The class also had the highest percentage of women in the study (56.2).
- This Contracts class was taught in a midwestern regional law school; it had 90
students. The professor was a European American male in his late forties who had been
trained at a regional law school and was among our more experienced teachers (more than
fifteen years). Along with Class #3, this class was at the low end of the study both in terms
of racial diversity and gender balance. It had only 7.7% students of color: 3.3% African
American, 3.3% Asian American, and 1.1% Latino/a. The class was 33.3% female. - Another measure of the degree of ongoing dialogue is the percentage of continuing
student turns found in each class (as opposed to first turns). Only 28% of student turns in
Class #7 are continuing turns, as opposed to 45 to 90% in the other classes. - This is a striking example of why counting turns alone fails to give an adequate
picture of overall classroom dynamics. - An enduring difference, noted earlier, is the greater number of professor ques-
tions devoted to drawing out the desired responses in Socratic classes. However, even in
the less focused exchanges we see that although the professors are switching speakers more
frequently, they still have to at times fish for promising responses, dropping hints and cues
and encouraging comments such as “If you pick this one up, you’re going to be reading all
of the materials very, very well. This is a difficult question.” - See Zemans and Rosenblum, Making of a Public Profession.
- It is not uncommon in hierarchical systems to find stricter adherence to certain
rhetorical forms in the higher categories. See, e.g., Bright and Ramanujan, “Sociolinguistic
Variation,” 157, 158–159; Errington, “On the Nature of the Sociolinguistic Sign,” 287, 289,
296–303. Garth and Martin have noted that the position of elite law schools in the com-
petitive hierarchy depends in part on the mobilization of similar kinds of symbolic capi-
tal. Garth and Martin, “Law Schools and the Construction of Competence,” 469, 504–505. - In using these categories, I am not endorsing them as measures of merit. Indeed,
several classes in schools ranked lower in the status hierarchy do a better job of creating
inclusive atmospheres for all of their students, while conveying the legal reasoning skills
common to all of the classrooms with arguably as great or more efficacy than some more
highly ranked classrooms and schools. However, as anthropologists have always been quick
to point out, the indigenous culture’s own status hierarchy is an important piece of any
adequate sociocultural analysis. It is in that sense that I deploy these categories here, in
the same spirit as a social scientist studying a caste system would provide information on
the relevant hierarchies without endorsing them.
258 Notes to Pages 164–171