Learning to Read Like a Lawyer 75Conceivably if you really have to go out there and prove scarcity,
which starts, though, trying to look like what? Real scarcity.
Class: (.03 turn) [multiple students speaking, individual utterances inaudible]
Prof.: –sort of uniqueness. A slightly broader definition of uniqueness, all
right. () be my mother’s diamond ring, it can be very rare potatoes,
but– all right. But what else, what other class of cases?
Student: Damages aren’t compensatory? Or --
Student #2: --right.
Prof.: All right, where damages aren’t compensatory, but I guess if you look
at the phrase before, it suggests: outputs in requirements contracts.
Remember when we did them?Here the professor summarizes across various textual sources, pulling out and
explaining key defining legal points that constitute part of the doctrine of specific
performance.
In these kinds of exchanges, professors make visible a logic uniting lines of
cases that have been read by the students. As in this example, teachers also draw
on sources in which legal principles are explicitly enunciated, most notably the
Restatement and the Uniform Commercial Code, but also various state and fed-
eral statutes or regulations, and so forth. At these moments, sometimes involving
mini-lectures, the professors step back from detailed dissection of individual cases
to point out a thread that runs through disparate cases, examples, and hypotheticals.
In the process of explaining legal doctrines, professors are also highlighting for
students the specific issues on which nit-picking factual analogies or distinctions
will have to rest. The resulting outline lays bare the backbone of legal structure that
is organizing factual comparisons, and it is a structure centered on legal authority,
using legal texts as the key filters of that authority.
Parsing Procedure
We have already extensively discussed the crucial role of deciphering legal proce-
dure in shaping legal readings. Particularly during classes early in the semester, but
also at later points, professors repeatedly remind students of the crucial role of legal
procedure in delimiting the relevant facts and the application of law to those facts.
This is, again, a lesson in legal reading found throughout the classrooms of this
study.
Social and Policy Implications
In an interesting contrast with the emphasis on precision in other aspects of the
legal reading taught to law students, class discussions of cases also frequently in-
clude wide-ranging discussions of the possible social and policy implications of legal
doctrines. These discussions are at times peppered with speculation as to causa-
tion, strategy, and motives: the motives of legal decision makers when ruling (or
legislating) in particular ways, or of people subject to law when behaving in cer-
tain ways.