Law, Language, and the Law School Classroom 21all points, our ongoing language use depends on an equally ongoing assessment of
what it is we are doing (e.g., having a fight, explaining a legal doctrine, giving tes-
timony, using technical language to exclude nonexpert listeners). We draw on
preexisting notions and categories of discourse (e.g., fighting, explaining, testify-
ing), and these are also always up for reinterpretation or even contestation (e.g.,
“No, I won’t fight with you” or “You’re not explaining a legal doctrine, you’re
perpetuating the violence inherent in legal categorization!”). This framing of in-
terlocutors’ understanding of “what we are doing as we speak now” actually im-
pacts the very meaning of the words we speak: I can say “Oh, the hell with you,
then” and have it mean the end of a relationship, a moment of joking repartee, a
crestfallen admission that I’ve lost an argument, a powerful moment of refusing to
let someone bully me. And much of this meaning will be given by the multiple layers
of context (where, with whom, how, why, with what background, etc. I am speak-
ing) in combination with my (and my interlocutors’) metalevel understandings of
what it is we are doing when we are speaking. This is subject to continual negotia-
tion, not set in stone. Large shifts in meaning may depend on small shifts in into-
nation, the raising of an eyebrow, or the use of one pronoun rather than another.
Thus, there is presupposed, shared cultural knowledge but also ongoing social cre-
ativity always at work as we speak. And nothing less than the ongoing structure of
our relationships, societies, and selves are at stake in this process.
This vision of language meaning—as multiple and overlapping, structured and
contingent, shared and individual, presupposed and creative; as emergent from the
use of language in context; as culturally forged and shaped in a practice of speak-
ing that is different in different cultures and languages; as central to social institu-
tions like schooling and law—is a vision that lies at the heart of much of the most
exciting current work in linguistic anthropology.
The Role of Language in Socialization
In studying how children are socialized to become members of their societies and
cultures, scholars such as Bambi Schieffelin and Elinor Ochs have demonstrated that
language use provides a central mechanism by which this process is accomplished.^40
It is through particular linguistic practices and exchanges that children form a vision
of their world, acquiring key frameworks within which emotions, cognitive under-
standings, and fundamental notions of the self operate. To take one small example,
in Samoa children are urged from very early ages to recognize and call out to other
villagers by name; as they walk with children, caregivers engage in ongoing linguistic
instruction designed to inculcate attentiveness to others and the beginnings of pro-
ficiency in complex greeting routines that indicate respect.^41 This and many other
kinds of exchanges build “affective” or emotional competence in these small initiates,
competence that they will need in order to take their places as mature and capable
members of their society. Conceptions of who they are, their place in society, what
range of emotionality is appropriate in given settings, and much more are formed in
an ongoing stream of linguistic routines and interactions with adults.^42
This process of language socialization is not confined to children’s language. As
we shall see in Chapter 4, the linguistic routines used by some law school professors