64 Similarity
new direction, the two cases will be brought together across time and place as part
of a developing line of precedent.^52 This approach collapses historical time and
social context in the service of a new legal framework whose organizing principle
is a genealogy of texts. Vast differences in the cultural meaning of particular kinds
of actions or items are elided and translated into a common legal language; a de-
fective coffee urn, mislabeled poison, a loaded gun, and defective hair wash be-
come analogous as “inherently dangerous” objects.^53 At the same time, a defective
carriage and a bursting lamp wind up in the “not-dangerous” category.^54 This legal
logic defies common everyday understandings, making partners of people and
objects that would ordinarily not be mentioned in the same conversation, let alone
sentence. They are brought together in a legal genealogy that binds plaintiffs, de-
fendants, and causes of action across time and space. This is another aspect of the
performative character of legal language: it creates new temporalities and contexts,
while translating and eliding others.
Legal approaches to textuality also depart from everyday understandings in
another way. We can recall that the broadly shared textualist approach to texts,
found elsewhere in U.S. education, views language as transparent, so that texts are
to be read for literal, referential meaning that is universally available. Here again
there is a sharp contrast with the case law tradition. It is perhaps not surprising to
find that much legal writing is characterized by the inaccessible expert language
found in many professions. But there is a more profound inaccessibility, for even
were all the technical vocabulary to be somehow transformed into more accessible
language, the meaning for which lawyers read the text would remain elusive to those
reading for referential content. A legal reading of case law focuses rather on the
metapragmatic structure of the text, in which lies the key to its authority. This
metapragmatic structure is (at least) twofold, indexing both the context of prior
cases in the textual tradition (now reanimated as precedent for this particular case),
and the procedural context of this particular case in its prior transformations.
To train students in this new kind of reading, as we have seen, law school class-
room discourse undermines a standard referentialist approach to text. Instead,
professors introduce students to a new legal storytelling, in which the landscape is
defined by other legal texts and by legal warrants for textual authority. In Chapter
6 we will explore further how the people and social contexts in this legal landscape
are defined. In this chapter and the next we focus on the overall structure of these
legal narratives and on the ways that this structure is taught to students.
A Shared Message: Constructing Legal
Accounts of Conflict from the Inside
We have unpacked the structure of the case law genre from the vantage of
metalinguistic warrants and structure, from categories that are external to a legal
worldview. Let us now approach the genre from a slightly different vantage, view-
ing the ordering of case law narratives as they are unfolded in law school classes,
using categories internal to a legal worldview. We will explore the logic of the case
law structure outlined in previous sections, but as it is enacted in classroom reci-