130 Similarity
as we’ve noted, is students’ location in a legal landscape, situated in a geography of
strategies and argument:
Transcript 6.27 [4/23/16]Prof.: All right, now the strangest part of all, I guess, uh Mr. H., let’s say you
know damn well that this potential infliction suit is a piece of garbage, all
right. But, you get a settlement out of me anyway. [... ]Transcript 6.28 [1/3/9]Prof.: Well, if I say I intend to give you five thousand dollars if you climb to the
top of the Sears Tower, is that an offer?Transcript 6.29 [1/3/25]Prof.: So, in other words, if I give you five thousand dollars this year for your
tuition, (is) part tuition, and five thousand dollars next year, () your
tuition (.) All right? And, depending on how you do in school for the next
two or three years, five thousand dollars. I’m wondering whether or not if
I renege you can sue me for breach of contract.Notice that there is a sense of spatial and relational coordinates in these pas-
sages, but again of an oddly abstract-contextual variety. In the first passage, the
student is described as getting a settlement “out of” the professor; in the second we
imagine the student catapulted to the top of a very tall building in return for five
thousand dollars; in the third we picture the student doggedly pursuing college studies
at a “standard average” college. In all three passages, use of the pronouns “I” and
“you,” as well as use of the present tense, foreground a speech situation in which the
operative locutions are crucially defined by legal (and linguistic) concerns. Pro-
fessors place students in the shoes of people occupying legal positions, located in
landscapes whose key referents are legal requirements. The primary relevant con-
text becomes that provided by legal argument and strategy. Places and related oc-
cupational characteristics become relevant spatial referents only through the filters
of legal jurisdiction and doctrine. Each time a professor places a student in this land-
scape, the student must learn to focus on the details needed to shape a legal argu-
ment: to convert social and spatial coordinates into legal categories. People and
problems are located in abstract individuals operating against the odd acontextual
context of a legal geography, two contracting parties interacting with each other—
even speaking in the first-person singular—against the backdrop of legal rights,
jurisdictions, and doctrines.
Summary: Learning to Think—and Talk—Like a Lawyer
As we will see in the next chapter, there is some striking variation among the pro-
fessors in this study in terms of discursive format, as well as in terms of their own
political and pedagogical philosophies regarding the proper role of law. It is there-
fore all the more intriguing to find strong continuities in metapragmatic structur-
ing beneath these apparent differences. These continuities express a more subtle