14 Introduction
are only part of the story of how law actually operates, they nonetheless remain as
a scaffolding on which much else builds: the linguistic structuring through which
a great deal of legal decision making proceeds.^7
Thus, we can rephrase the question a bit, asking: Is there a central vision or
form of reasoning shared by those who have received legal training in the United
States today, across their many differences? How does U.S. law, at the broadest
level, conceive of the world and people with which it deals; is there an underly-
ing worldview or epistemology that binds together the diverse ends of the legal
profession by virtue of a similar initial socialization into legal language? There
are, of course, multiple layers to consider in answering even this narrower ques-
tion, for beyond any common expert understanding of legal categories and con-
cepts, legal practitioners also share forms of practical knowledge and reasoning
based on commonalities in the work they perform, on similar informal ideologies
or folklore about law, and so forth.^8 Here we approach the question of a shared
vision of law through an examination of the way that students are ushered into the
world of legal thinking, treating the educational process of legal training as a win-
dow on that world, a place where the modes of thinking that characterize a legal
worldview will be revealed as they are imparted to initiates. And indeed, this study
does find that there are certain core understandings that are shared across the class-
rooms of this study, understandings that, when examined together, reveal a core
orientation underlying U.S. legal reasoning.
Differing Views of Law from Within?
At the same time as the study examines shared understandings, it also investigates
how the classrooms we observed diverge from one another. In inquiring about
differences among the classrooms, we ask: To what degree is any common vision
refracted differentially through the experiences of students and teachers who come
to the law from varying social backgrounds? If all law students must learn to speak
roughly similar legal language, to use the same forms of reasoning, do some stu-
dents take to this new language differently from others? Do some students approach
or react to their new legal vision of the world in distinctive ways? Do some profes-
sors create—whether through deliberate design or not—different kinds of class-
room settings within which this new worldview is inculcated, and if so, how do
various students respond to these differences? And what is the impact of divergent
law school cultures on the teaching and learning processes?
Here we enter the debate about social difference that is raging all over our
culture today—and the legal academy is, predictably, no exception. Although fun-
damental legal categories and the methods used to teach them were for many years
viewed as somehow neutral, above the social divisions found in society generally,
powerful arguments have emerged to undermine this presumption of neutrality.^9
Not only is the administration of justice in the United States deeply skewed to favor
those in power, scholars have suggested, but indeed the basic legal categories and
forms of reasoning themselves set up an uneven playing field.^10 Hidden behind
standard legal concepts such as the time-honored “reasonable man” standard, critics
have argued, are deeply social visions of what kinds of experience count—and those