Law, Language, and the Law School Classroom 17developing a model of how language works in the law school classroom, and in the
law more generally.
The Role of Language in Society
A number of traditions in linguistics, social theory, and anthropology converge on
the study of language as an essential key to understanding human social life and
psychology. These traditions insist that we study language in particular social set-
tings, departing from the approaches that have focused on broad structural char-
acteristics of language. Those previous approaches often attempted to use very
abstract and general models of how Language (with a capital “L”) works as the
foundation for insights about human society or cognition. By contrast, this recent
work in anthropology, sociolinguistics, and related fields investigates languages on
the ground, in practice, as they are used by particular people in their daily lives.
From a careful study of the way languages mediate social interactions, there emerges
a quite different view of the role of language in human life, one in which language
is valuable not because it affords insights into universal structures, but because it
is particularly sensitive to different social settings, particularly imbued with the
social life of which it is a part.
Perhaps one of the most famous formulations of the relationship between lan-
guage and culture emerged from the works of language scholars Benjamin Lee
Whorf and Edward Sapir and their followers.^18 Controversial from the outset, this
school of linguistics examines the contribution of language structure to understand-
ing the way speakers in different cultures think about and approach the practicalities
of social life. Early on, the Whorfian approach was interpreted using rigidly deter-
minist readings, in which the influence of language on thought and behavior was
conceived as set in stone and painfully straightforward (e.g., a particular grammati-
cal category is thought of as rigidly and single-handedly determinative of how speak-
ers are capable of thinking about a certain aspect of the world).^19 Critics of this
approach rightly rejected any implication that language categories could mold
people’s brains in so simple and rigid a fashion. However, recent reinterpretations
of the Whorf-Sapir tradition have restored for us the more subtle vision inherent
in Whorf’s careful explication of the “habitual” character of language patterning.^20
Whorf did not intend to link differences in language with rigid limits on mental
functioning—as if a speaker raised in one language could never learn different ways
of talking and understanding. Rather, in his view, the regular use of the categories
and ways of talking found in a particular language-and-culture broadly shape speak-
ers’ habitual understandings of the world.^21 These habitual understandings can be
amended or shifted, and can fluctuate or vary through different uses, contexts, and
parts of societies. However, Whorf teaches us that even these shifts will occur in
and through language, and thus can be studied there.
Another contribution of this tradition is an insistence that we examine more
than just words or concepts in studying language, so that we can capture the ha-
bitual patterning of cultural understanding that occurs through the use of whole
systems of language (grammars) day after day throughout speakers’ lives. Current
work in anthropological linguistics warns against a focus on individual words, as