26 Introduction
The Role of Language in Law, Legal Reasoning, and Legal Education
The centrality of language and language structure to legal reasoning has long been
recognized by legal theorists. From John Austin’s conceptualization of law as the
“command” of a sovereign through Ronald Dworkin’s insistence on the centrality
of interpretation to law, jurisprudence has grappled with the place of language in
legal decision making.^77 Legal scholars investigating the structure of legal reason-
ing from a variety of angles seem inevitably to wind up asking questions about
legal language or rhetoric and how it works.^78 In an interesting early attempt to
map the language of an evolving doctrine, Edward Levi showed how phrases such
as “imminently dangerous” and “inherently dangerous” took on a life of their own
over time in legal reasoning, going through messy periods of linguistic evolution
during which jurists themselves became somewhat unclear about the meaning of
the obstreperous legal categories.^79 James Boyd White has suggested that in the lan-
guage of judicial opinions, judges constitute communities and engage in con-
versations that can foster or discourage democracy.^80 And scholars like Patricia
Williams and Duncan Kennedy have looked at the law school classrooms in which
this language is taught as prisms through which we can see, in crystallized form,
the language of law in action—though the landscape they discern is very bleak
indeed, reinforcing existing power asymmetries, sexism, and racism.^81
Indeed, over the years, a great deal has been written about law school educa-
tion by legal academics, much of it taking the form of a debate over the relative
benefits and detriments of particular approaches to law school education.^82 Ever
since 1870, when Christopher Columbus Langdell introduced his new revolution-
ary approach at the Harvard Law School, law school teaching has had its own dis-
tinctive “Socratic method” genre of teaching. Langdell linked this method for
teaching with an overall substantive theory of law, predicated on the idea that there
are foundational legal principles, analogous to scientific law, that are discernable
through analysis of the raw data of appellate cases. Although it is not clear to what
extent people using the label “Socratic method” are actually talking about the same
kind of speech genre,^83 commentators continue to speak of Socratic teaching as
the signal approach to law school pedagogy.^84 The stereotypic picture of this genre
is that professors question students on the cases assigned for a particular class,
so that information is imparted not through lecture or explanation but through
an ongoing stream of questions designed to challenge unquestioned assumptions
and reveal underlying legal principles.^85 There have been numerous critiques of
Langdell’s formalist philosophy and pedagogical system—most notably from the
legal realist school of the 1930s, which also pressed for more clinical education
in law schools,^86 and more recently from critical scholars within the legal acad-
emy.^87 However, despite a number of arguably successful attacks on the substan-
tive underpinnings of Langdell’s approach, the method itself appears to have
outlasted its theoretical rationale.^88
Central themes in critiques of Socratic method teaching in law schools have
been that it fails to impart moral values, that it imparts the wrong moral values,
that it is not functionally adequate even for teaching doctrine, that it causes un-
necessary and harmful stress, that it favors white male students, that it fosters in-