112 Similarity
no longer clearly a direct quotation, as the professor slides more clearly into
an intriguing mix of voices. The student supplies the missing direct quotation
in his answer, and this pattern is repeated in the next exchange (“by relying,
you’re”doing what? “Being unreasonable”). Notice that the professor’s initial
invitation had placed the student directly into a dialogic exchange with the
two judges (“a generous judge says to you”), but by the final student turn in
the excerpt, the student is speaking to himself in the judge’s voice (“You’re
being unreasonable”), an intriguing use of the pronoun “you”! Here the in-
teraction of the imagined dialogue between judges and student with the ac-
tual pedagogical dialogue between student and professor creates a fascinating
and complex layering of voice and footing. In the process, the student is un-
moored from even the once-removed self created by the imagined role-play.
The quickly shifting footing elevates fluency in speech-participant roles over
the anchoring of self in any particular position.
The professor goes on to describe the “fierce” judge’s position as the “market”
or “business” position, which she opposes to the “generous” or “bleeding-
heart” position. This neatly packages characterization into catchphrases cen-
tered on identity as defined by discursive position in an argument. The student
is invited to imagine himself caught between these two conflicting ideologies/
interlocutors, responding to a judge who is berating him for his approach to
the bargain. The issue is triply contextualized in a single, vivid move: we have
at once the context of the abstract legal subject bargaining, of conflicting
political-philosophical traditions in Anglo-American jurisprudence, and of the
student as role-player in a classroom drama.^28
(5) Finally, use of direct quotation and dialogue to define and character-
ize legal personae in this way also stresses the essential contestability of any
story or account of events, reminding students always to look to the other side,
to ask what could be said in rebuttal. In a sense, each person becomes (mini-
mally) half of a pair-part structure, whose salience and location are defined
by discursive position in an argument. (Of course, there can be more than two
positions in more complicated cases.) The only limit to contestability lies in
the chain of authoring authority whereby legal facticity and guiding principles
are established. And this chain itself is composed of nested sets of arguments
and interlocutors.Thus, we see that a great deal of power is packed into the positioning of legal per-
sonae as competing interlocutors in arguments. From a metalinguistic standpoint,
it is actually a speaker’s discursive position that turns out to be that person’s key
defining attribute in this system. And this position is a function of strategic con-
siderations. Note that this is quite a reductive understanding; it reduces the vast
complexities of personality, motivation, and the construction of self to the easily
summarized contours of discursive position. Just as we saw in Chapter 4, a legal
reading takes very complicated social events, issues, and people and uses the sim-
plifying filters of doctrine, procedure, and, here, argumentative/strategic position,
to translate complexity into manageable propositions. These propositions—the
holding of the case, for example, or the position taken by the plaintiff or appellate