28 Introduction
repudiates the purported benefits of “gentle” pedagogical approaches in law schools,
insisting that one of the virtues of true Socratic teaching is its acerbic edge, which
prepares students for “demanding judges who are impatient with attorneys who
are not well prepared or who do not answer their questions directly.”^105 In this study,
I present analyses that demonstrate a different potential congruence between the
canonical Socratic method and legal thinking—not an argument for greater teach-
ing efficacy, certainly, given other results of the study, but an argument for a strong
resonance or linguistic fit.^106
Some social science research has attempted to assess specifically what skills are
imparted in law school by particular methods and how that might vary across law
schools. Several studies found differences among law schools according to pres-
tige ranking of the school, with elite schools less likely to emphasize rigid rules and
more likely to emphasize analytical thinking and theory.^107 Interestingly, however,
regardless of where they went to law school, lawyers in one study overwhelmingly
agreed that “ ‘ability to think like a lawyer’ was the most important knowledge
imparted by law schools.”^108 This knowledge includes specific skills such as “fact
gathering,” “capacity to marshal and order facts to apply concept,” and “ability to
understand and interpret opinions, regulations, and statutes.”^109 These results were
confirmed in research by Garth, Martin, and Landon on current attitudes among
urban and rural attorneys.^110 The one area that practitioners across the board agreed
was important to practicing lawyers, and that they agreed was relatively well ad-
dressed by law school teaching, was legal reasoning: “There are some relative suc-
cesses in teaching the specifically legal skills of legal reasoning, legal research,
substantive law, and now also professional responsibility.”^111 A question that re-
mains is whether any particular teaching methods are important to attaining this
reported success.
Studies of teaching method have often produced negative results; there is little,
if any, relation found between the method used and the results. Thus, controlled
experiments in which first-year classes were divided into separate groups, some
taught Socratically and others not, resulted in generally similar performances.^112
When Bryden attempted to test the difference between first- and third-year abili-
ties to perform functional analysis applying concepts to facts, to distinguish hold-
ing from dicta, and to construe ambiguous statutes, he found less difference than
would be expected, given that third-year students had had a number of years of
training using the Socratic method.^113
From a linguistic standpoint, to bring our discussion back to its starting point,
the Socratic method can be understood as an oral genre or speech style, and this
study tackles the issue of teaching method from that standpoint. It may be obvi-
ous that children are learning new orientations when their parents and teachers
teach them spoken and written language, but adults can also undergo similar
transformations. Building on Whorf’s insights about the orienting power of lan-
guage structure, we can expand beyond the effects of grammatical categories on
speakers’ habitual perceptions to examine the effects of the contextual organiza-
tion of language as a system in use. Viewed in this way, linguistic ideology and
metapragmatic structuring can be understood as powerful influences shaping law-
yers’ orientations. As we will see, learning to read written legal texts is one key