214 Conclusion
which common law jurists make one concrete situation equivalent to another, the
move between abstract and concrete also contains hidden cultural assumptions.^17
We have traced in some detail the way this process works in the law school class-
room, shifting students’ attention away from social contextual cues and norma-
tive assessment toward layers of legal-textual authority.
Baker perceptively summarizes the multiple effects of the classroom shift docu-
mented in my study.^18 In addition to erasing socially relevant aspects of context
that are not important to legal doctrine, legal reasoning “reformulates relatively
concrete facts at higher levels of abstraction,” losing the “detailed particulars of a
socially situated narrative” in its quest for commensurability.^19 It also “disrupts what
small amount of phenomenological narrative coherence remains in a case” as it
prioritizes analogical comparison.^20 Finally, students are unmoored from ethical
and social identities, attached to new legal roles as adversarial speakers on either
side of an argument. This substitutes an amoral attachment to legal form for a
situated sense of loyalty to substantive ends and values.^21 Hirsch notes that in
this setting dominant cultural forms are “highly visible,” from the ready control
of discourse exercised disproportionately by white male students through the pre-
dominance of decontextualized language that “tends toward disconnection from
moral entailments.”^22 Although this patterning is indeed quite visible from the
outside, it is also true that metalinguistic speech and ideology in law school class-
rooms naturalize the dominance of one cultural form over others.^23 Thus, some-
thing that is actually culturally shaped takes on the appearance of being neutral
or natural. Winter makes a similar point about the tacit power of seemingly
uncontroversial categorization processes, which smuggle normative content into
legal decision making: “Law is always ideological in the sense that it enforces (and
reinforces) the dominant normative views of the culture.”^24 This study adds the
insight that an inevitably social dimension of law is also “imported,” as Jonathan
Yovel would say, through pragmatics and metapragmatics.^25 Yovel’s theory of “nor-
mative importation” carefully delineates the mechanisms by which language in
general (and legal language in particular) is always quietly drawing on and inter-
nalizing social norms. The tacit character of this linguistic structuring makes its
effects difficult to discern.
Language, Linguistic Ideology, and Legal Epistemology:
Within and beyond Social Power
As we have examined the process by which law students are initiated into an ab-
stract-yet-concrete approach to human conflict, we have continually observed the
central mediating role of language and linguistic ideology. Susan Philips’s pioneer-
ing sociolinguistic article on legal education described the process as, at core, lin-
guistic, as “learning the cant.”^26 In an early article on the topic, James Elkins also
pointed out the central role of talking like a lawyer to the construction of the legal
persona and its characteristic mode of thought.^27 I have built on their observations
here to delineate the way this language-learning process relies on an ideology of
text and language—a linguistic ideology. Focusing on ideology, according to