Law, Language, and the Law School Classroom 25determinist approach, scholars such as Apple and Giroux pointed out that schools
serve as fora for struggle over social power, and thus are not mere reflexes of eco-
nomic structure.^67 They took issue with determinist theories on two points: first, they
argued that people who are disadvantaged in a particular society do not become
passive receptacles of dominant culture, but instead retain their capacity to struggle;
second, they insisted that social institutions such as schools are characterized by some
measure of autonomy from economic structure, however small.^68 Carnoy and Levin
further argued that if Western educational institutions provide a somewhat autono-
mous forum with a dynamic of its own, then an essential aspect of that dynamic is
tension between preparing citizens for participation in democratic society (i.e., train-
ing them to know and fight for their rights under the law) and training workers who
can function in relatively authoritarian work regimes.^69
Functional conflicts of the sort described by Carnoy and Levin would obvi-
ously differ across subcultures and societies along with cultural conceptions of
citizenship, with differing economic situations and needs for worker training, and
with different roles for educational institutions themselves.^70 The work of Pierre
Bourdieu on education incorporates this notion of culturally circumscribed edu-
cational practices and also recognizes a somewhat autonomous dynamic to edu-
cational organizations.^71 At the same time, Bourdieu thinks that schooling plays a
key role in reproducing class structures, and that language is an essential part of
that process.^72
There is a continuing tension in this scholarly tradition between these more
macrostructural accounts that consider broader social and cultural patterns and
less reductive microlevel accounts that capture the complex and creative dynamics
at work on the ground in educational settings.^73 As Yon explains, during the 1990s
research in the area followed “an increasing move away from essentialism toward
a view of race, gender, and class as social processes linked to competing interests
in education and society.”^74 One of the key conceptual tools in this antiessentialist
move is the concept of “schooling as a discursive space,” in which the micro and
macro interact in complex, nondeterminist ways.^75 Scholars such as Stanton
Wortham who are working in the area of language and education have pointed
to the analysis of indexical structuring in discourse as an important tool for
achieving this micro-macro synthesis.^76
This study, then, examines underlying cultural and power dynamics at work
in the language of the law school classroom, but also considers ways that legal
training might transcend or gain some measure of autonomy from these dynam-
ics. The analysis brings together two different approaches: psychologists’ and
linguists’ focus on how the language of education interacts with the formation
of social epistemologies and identities, and sociologists’ and anthropologists’
broader concern about the role of education in reproducing power relations.
Drawing on a Silversteinian framework, we will pay careful attention to indexi-
cal structuring and the creativity of real-time discursive processes in an effort to
bridge the micro-macro analytic divide. Thus, building from a strong tradition
in anthropology, sociolinguistics, and linguistic ethnography of education, this
study examines the details of classroom interactions to understand the larger
dynamics at work in educational processes.