Legal Language and American Law 211fessors in this study who taught at a local/regional school subsequently moved
into teaching at an elite/prestige law school. Thus, it would not be surprising
to find some differentiation among professors based on their career aspirations.
It seems important, then, to give full weight to differences among law schools
by status while also acknowledging the complexities that do not permit us to paint
a completely deterministic picture of their impact. This picture would contain
a balanced view of similarities and differences in pedagogy across different kinds
of law schools, rather than erasing one part of the picture in favor of the other.
This study, then, demonstrates that school status, race, gender, and other as-
pects of social context all matter, but they have their effects in complex interactions
that require careful contextual analysis. The social differences among students and
classrooms affect the interactions and learning that occur in law school in ways that
can be characterized as “underdeterminate”;^9 that is, race and gender are important,
in some ways formative, but not completely determining aspects of classroom ex-
changes. Students of different race or class backgrounds, of different genders or sexual
preferences or ages can be simultaneously “different” and the “same”: they may re-
spond similarly to some aspects of context but differently to others. Professors of
different backgrounds or generations may approach teaching differently even within
the same institution. As we struggle with this more complicated picture, we have to
use more particular and careful questions, asking how the mixture of school profile,
discourse style, teacher profile, class composition, student profile, interactive dynam-
ics, and the content of discussion may have combined to create more or less egalitar-
ian sites for learning and discussion.^10
Lesson Two: The Role of Contextual Cues in Signaling
Cultural-Linguistic Epistemologies
A second lesson about context to be drawn from this study is the role of contex-
tual cues in conveying a shared underlying epistemology. Thus, we have seen that
subtle aspects of the pragmatic structure of classroom discourse shift students’
attention away from accustomed social contextual anchors and toward new legal-
contextual frameworks. Even professors with apparently different discourse styles
may reproduce similar dialogic formats—one in dialogue with a student, the other
using an apparently dialogic form with himself during a monologue—but each
conveying a sense of the importance of argument and a certain form of dialogic
questioning to the new legal persona inculcated during legal training. Through this
dialogic format, old identities are unmoored and a new, discursively anchored
identity emerges, one whose primary navigation points emerge from a parsing of
written texts and legal authority.
Lesson Three: Legal Erasures of Context through Discourse Structure
This brings us to the third lesson about context found in this study: the way proto-
typical legal discourse tends to erase particular aspects of social context. As Regina
Austin explains: