Learning to Read Like a Lawyer 57cal terms. In each of the examples, the professor is using the structure of Socratic
questioning to highlight pragmatic aspects of legal texts, in particular, the ways that
the texts become authoritative through the invocation of legal contexts. The text
itself is highlighted here, rather than the story (reversing the common understand-
ing of texts as mere vehicles for telling the story). Read in this light, these legal cases
could be viewed as telling quite distinctly legal kinds of stories: tales of prior legal
decisions at various levels (which are thus metalevel stories that reflect on the
storytelling itself).
In Transcript 4.2, the professor sought a procedural term, “appealed,” which
drew attention to the history of the case as it was presented in the opinion the stu-
dents read. Before a case reaches the state (or U.S.) supreme court level, it typi-
cally has moved through several levels, advancing from the trial court through an
intermediate appellate court to the ultimate decision by a supreme court, and each
move involves the invocation of various legal procedures.^35 In more complex cases,
particularly criminal ones, the case can move up and down these levels a number
of times, as, for example, when an appellate court rules that a lower court’s deci-
sion was in error and sends the case back for reconsideration or retrial, or when a
prisoner, having exhausted appeal procedures in the state system, attempts to re-
ceive redress in the federal system.
The procedural history of a case frames and delimits the current text’s author-
ity. The words in the opinion have force only because the case was formulated and
reformulated in a particular way through successive procedural stages, and they
have only the force that is prescribed by the procedural stance of the opinion. Thus,
the technical term that the professor is training the student to notice in our ex-
ample links the text to previous linguistic contexts, to courts and opinions that
were part of its procedural development. If the case was not appealed properly from
the court below, then the appellate court may lack the authority or jurisdiction to
rule on it at all. Or some specific issues may not be properly before the appellate
court if there was some defect in the procedure by which they were appealed.
The uptake structure of classroom discourse is pragmatic in the sense that it
conveys meaning by virtue of its contextual grounding, referring both to the writ-
ten text assignment and to the unfolding linguistic context provided by the
teacher-student exchange. This contrasts, for example, with a lecture, which can
be characterized as conveying meaning through a far greater reliance on seman-
tic content, independent of any particular context or set of listeners. And if the
uptake sequence is a pragmatic structuring of classroom discourse, the technical
term it highlights in Transcript 4.2 is a key to the pragmatic structure of the
written text—a structure by which the legal opinion takes on authority in the
current context, a contextual connection that provides social power. In other
words, depending on the manner in which the case was appealed, this court is
empowered to decide on some things but not on others, and the words of the
court have effect only within that framework. Here the pragmatic structure of
law classroom discourse is used to train students to read written legal texts
through the lens of their legally specified pragmatic structures.
Transcript 4.3 provided a slightly more complex case. There, the technical
words to which the professor directed students’ attention were not procedural but