Learning to Read Like a Lawyer 59story involved or the various potentially relevant social contexts. In searching the
text for these layers of legal authority, students learn a style of reading that filters
and frames the story of the case in a new way. Now the core messages for which
they search the written text focus on relationships with previous legal texts, with
authoritative authors—usually courts or legislatures—and with the legal actors who
guided this particular case through earlier stages of the legal process (the trial judge,
the jury, the attorneys on either side who shaped the arguments now at issue). A
legal reading is first and foremost about textual and legal authority—about prag-
matic warrants—and often that authority is to be deciphered from unpacking
metalinguistic connections among legal texts and authors. When these connections
have been established to frame the discussion, then the teaching of legal reasoning
can proceed within this frame. The core questions and issues become ones dictated
by the legal warrants, and students are taught to reason and speak using the cate-
gories and analogies that are salient within this legally delimited view of the con-
flict at issue in a particular case.
Another obvious and ubiquitous feature of Socratic method teaching is its
insistence on a dialogic or argumentative form from which, eventually, legal truth
emerges. This has some very obvious parallels with courtroom discourse and with
the U.S. legal system’s overall dependence on procedure as a guarantor of justice.^40
(As long as both parties get their day in court, represented by attorneys who will
engage in vigorous linguistic combat on their behalf, justice is done.) The classic
Socratic dialogue in law teaching, then, both indexes and mirrors a core legal model
not only of how knowledge or truth is obtained but also of how justice is achieved.
This powerful combination of epistemology and morality carries with it implica-
tions for conceptions of self, defining the contours of relevance that also shape legal
conceptions of identity and personhood.^41 In one sense, we could question whether
the classic law school teaching method really is a dialogue embodying two distinct
voices, because its goal is to herd unruly interlocutors into a single, uniformly legal
discursive approach. On the other hand, a defining feature of that approach is a
continual shifting between adversarial positions, which are quite clearly defined as
distinct and opposed voices. As we will see, this apparent contradiction is resolved
when we pay close attention to footing in law school discourse. A close examina-
tion reveals that law teaching very commonly combines a division between sharply
demarcated and distinct voices with ubiquitous elision of footing.^42
Through our examination of Socratic pedagogy, we have begun to discern some
distinctive aspects of legal readings. In particular, we have seen that legal reading
relies on a contextual framework with layers of legal and textual authority. To pro-
vide a more comprehensive and in-depth understanding of this legal-textual frame-
work, we now turn to a broader overview of the core features defining a distinctively
legal reading of U.S. law texts.
Fundamental Aspects of Legal Readings and the Case Law Genre
As we have seen, law school classroom discussions provide a kind of prism through
which we can discern core features of legal readings and texts. Although there are,