216 Conclusion
in coming to a decision, which may in turn instantiate yet another point of view).
In other words, in legal language, we know this fact because it was found and
written down (entextualized) by an authoritative court, operating under correct
metalinguistic rules and with the proper authority. One of the miracles of this
system is its ability to combine certainty with such a flexible—indeed, at times de-
liberately agnostic—approach to social reality. The legal epistemology taught in
the prototypical first-year U.S. law classroom, embodied in the practice of learn-
ing to read cases, employs a set of linguistic procedures to generate knowledge that
is at once flexible enough to encompass almost any conceivable context, while still
generating certainty (defined within linguistic parameters) and rules with know-
able parameters (again linguistic), that nevertheless change as they are applied.
From a world in which normative judgment is circumscribed by a rich sense
of social context—who someone was, the full depth of feelings and motives that
inspired certain actions, the circumstances that conspired to push events in one
way or another, personal histories, social inequalities, and more—law students are
moved into a new world, in which legal judgment is circumscribed by linguistic
norms, texts and the arguments they permit, and layers of authoritative language.
The orienting compass that guides them is metalinguistic in the strongest sense:
an ideology of language that circumscribes social reality completely. Justice is done
if the proper linguistic protocols are observed, if the opposition of voices is liter-
ally represented in apparently dialogic form in court and in written opinions—as
it is also in law school classrooms. Gal and Irvine would call this “iconicity”: lin-
guistic ideology reading language form as a mirror of social phenomena.^30 (It is
also an example of “erasure,” because a focus on procedure renders invisible the
ways some oppositional voices and viewpoints are not making it into the discus-
sion at all.) As Morris explains, a core aim of legal reasoning is “to rupture linguis-
tic forms, polite forms, non-lawyerly forms, and to introduce a necessary pugilism”
as it imposes “a limiting order, an institutionalized order, a boundarying of ratio-
nality.”^31 As I’ve demonstrated, this reorientation in epistemology is accomplished
in large part through a shift in linguistic practices, effectuated in and through a
shift in linguistic ideologies.
The intimate relationship between linguistic ideology and legal epistemol-
ogy has been noted by a number of language-and-law scholars in recent years.
Susan Hirsch has carefully dissected the role of linguistic ideology in Kenyan
courts, demonstrating that conceptions about words and their proper deploy-
ment in courtroom storytelling effectively frame and limit what can be said and
known about social conflict.^32 Greg Matoesian takes this insight into U.S. court-
rooms, using a detailed analysis of speech to show “how linguistic ideologies
interface in a reflexive moment with male hegemony and structures of language
use to form an epistemological strategy.... What counts as knowledge, as a
fact, and how do we know?”^33 And in her volume on changes of plea in Ari-
zona courts, Susan Philips traces how judges appeal to a monolithic “legal in-
terpretive framework” that undergirds “the claims of lawyers to a universalistic
scientific and moral epistemology and to direct apprehension of this epistemol-
ogy by an individual mind rather than a sociocultural mind.”^34 Her analysis dem-
onstrates that metalinguistic ideology regarding the relationship of written text