Law, Language, and the Law School Classroom 29component of this orienting practice, conveyed in the process of the particular kind
of language socialization that we find in legal education. Learning the language of
law, then, involves a reorientation not only in how students speak, but also in how
they approach written language. (See Chapter 4 for further discussion of how an-
thropologists approach the practices associated with written and performed texts.)
Linguistic anthropologists, sociolinguists, and others studying language in
social context have developed a considerable literature on the social ramifications
of different discourse styles or genres, and on the role of language in classrooms.
In particular, linguistic anthropologist Susan Philips characterized what happens
in law school classrooms as “acquiring the ‘cant’ ”: as learning a new way of speak-
ing.^114 Empirical researchers have also delineated the distinctive shape of legal lan-
guage in courtrooms, law offices, and other legal settings. Recent books in the area
by John Conley and William O’Barr, Susan Hirsch, Gregory Matoesian, and Susan
Philips have shown that legal language plays a crucial, nontransparent role in me-
diating social conflict, social change, and the distribution of power in societies.^115
Matoesian and Conley and O’Barr clarify the ways social power affects and is trans-
lated through the language of law. They do not, however, depict legal language as
a simplistic reflex of social structure, but analyze it as a complex resource with its
own dynamics.^116 However, along with scholars like Charles Briggs, they do also
stress that legal discourse can operate to reinforce social inequality, while essen-
tially hiding its own tracks.^117
Philips and Hirsch examine the impact of culture and ideology on how legal texts
are differentially contextualized and used in court. Philips demonstrates the com-
plicated ways that politics can be filtered through metalinguistic structure to affect
judicial behavior, so that judges with different political ideologies operationalize the
very same textual language quite differently. Hirsch combines analyses of the dis-
courses of Islamic law, Swahili ethics, spiritual health, and Kenyan law in studying
how marital disputes are discussed in a Kenyan court. In keeping with Philips’s ear-
lier research on Tongan law, Hirsch resists the idea that there is a single, uniform,
state-enforced ideology regimenting Kenyan courtroom discourse. Instead, she
stresses that legal negotiations involve multiple layers of language and ideology,
which interact with one another in sometimes unpredictable ways.^118
Sally Merry reached similar findings in her study of working-class plaintiffs in
U.S. courts. She shows how the intertwining discourses of law, morality, and therapy
interact to frame the claims that litigants bring to court, accepting some as valid and
dismissing others as “garbage cases.”^119 Paradoxically, litigants have to accept state
intervention in their lives as they attempt to gain power through perceived legal en-
titlements. As Sarat and Felstiner have documented, in this process, the imposition
of legal discourse requires that people separate aspects of their experience and selves
from others; Merry explains that “the construction of some kinds of identity and
effacing of others is a fundamental aspect of the power of the law in the present as
well as the past.”^120 We see this dynamic in the law school classroom as well.
Greenhouse’s landmark work among the Baptists of “Hopewell” took this issue of
identity and law up to the level of community, tracking how legal discourse can mark
the line between insider and outsider, between past and present, between acceptance
and exclusion.^121 Thus, anthropologists have provided us with an in-depth picture