Learning to Read Like a Lawyer 79peting visions of justice, and more. These broadly painted backgrounds surround
the nitty-gritty dissection of fact, law, and procedure with which law students and
their professors are centrally occupied. They add humanity, humor, and purpose
to an otherwise highly technical, removed discourse. However, they stand in marked
contrast to the central legal discussion, marginal not only in terms of discursive
structure, but also because these policy discussions never impart any real analytic
standards for assessing one story against another. (Arguably, one would need to
teach some form of social science to accomplish this.) When social context comes
in the door, structure, standards, and rigor exit.
Policing the Boundaries: Ordering Legal Narratives
At the same time as students are learning to read case law texts in terms of these new
categories, they must also absorb the proper deployment of the categories. Profes-
sors repeatedly remind students to keep different components separate, instructing
them in the conventions surrounding correctly structured legal narratives. This proper
structuring, in contrast to conventions ordering some other genres, does not always
require a set order of components. Indeed, as we will see, it is at times necessary to
mix components or blur boundaries to create an integrated legal reading. But first it
is important to understand where the lines are drawn: which components cannot be
put in front of or mixed with others, which parts of the story must be in place before
certain conclusions can be discussed or drawn.
For example, in the following excerpt, a professor interrupts a student in the
act of mixing fact-recitation with legal argument:
Transcript 4.17 [1/9/23]Student: But in any case, before the Board made the ultimate decision to accept
her resignation or not, she goes on to argue // that //
Prof.: // See // but what you’re
doing is you’re just jumping ahead here. You’re stealing the knockout
punch. You’ve got to wait. But it’s okay. Let’s work with this. Okay, all
right. So the next thing that happens is you’ve got this school reacting
by having her thrown off and kept off the property? Is that right?Here the professor wants to make sure that the student has laid out all of the im-
portant facts of the case before moving on to consider the legal arguments devel-
oped from those facts. Certain factual details need to be in place for these arguments
to be comprehensible; therefore, it will not work to move too quickly to the punch
line.
This theme can be seen even more clearly in the following excerpt, in which a
professor overtly instructs a student on the art of legal storytelling:
Transcript 4.18 [6/4/1–2]Prof.: Okay. Why don’t you tell us the story of Mills v. Wyman.
Student: Sure. Uh, in this case, Levi Wyman is () years old and long emancipated
from his family, returned from a sea trip and took ill, the plaintiff in
this case () Mills took Levi in and cared for him until his death on