Legal Language and American Law 219field, while also opening the door to interdisciplinary studies of law as it interacts
with society, economics, politics, psychology, and so forth. However, the question
of how we are to balance these two ways of understanding law is a difficult one,
and White tends to take a very optimistic view of the possibilities for “intellectual
integration” among diverse disciplines.^46
By contrast, Dorf (like Schlegel, with whom we opened this section) presents
a pessimistic view of the likelihood that those trained in law can or will obtain the
expertise necessary to translate empirical research:
Legal questions almost invariably call for some mixture of normative and empirical
analysis. Although the Socratic method can be used to lay bare the empirical assump-
tions associated with various normative claims, it provides no tools for testing those
assumptions.... Despite legal realism’s successful critique... , to a significant de-
gree American legal education and American legal reasoning continue to proceed from
Langdell’s premise that the answers to difficult legal questions are to be found in the
reports of judicial decisions.^47We have seen empirical support for Dorf ’s characterization in the transcripts of
this study: when it is time to discuss the assumptions about society and people that
underlie the judicial decisions students read, law professors routinely invite specu-
lation and anecdote. When law professors stray into the realms addressed by the
social sciences, there is no attempt to achieve the kind of “internal” interdiscipli-
nary understanding of other fields urged by White. (Nor is there any reason, given
what we now know about law school training, to expect that they would have been
given the tools to do so.) By contrast, students are faced with systematic demands
for proof and evidence when they are discussing legal texts and tests. White would
doubtless respond that his optimism about the possibilities of genuine interdisci-
plinary integration is more a hope for the future than a description of the current
state of our academic discourse. But one concern that lingers after a close exami-
nation of current law teaching is the closed nature of the linguistic system taught
to first-year law students. Without some countervailing instruction, this system
can easily lend itself to a form of methodological arrogance, in which its practitio-
ners feel themselves able to master any material with which they are presented by
running it through a legal reading. This kind of reading has its strengths, but it
also has its blind spots, and unlike many social science fields (although certainly
not all), law’s metalinguistic structure does not have a mechanism by which its own
basic orientations and structure of authority can be opened to question.^48 To the
contrary, it inculcates a sense of rampant capacity to translate all kinds of events
and situations without regard to the possibility that the translation may miss the
mark in important ways, or that it needs to be open to alternative sources of au-
thority and epistemologies.
Silverstein warns of the kind of “misfire” that can occur when would-be
“translators” imagine that they can transparently move between different cul-
turally embedded systems of meaning, denying the inevitable “transformation”
that must occur in this situation.^49 The further we move into the kind of mean-
ing that relies on context and pragmatics, the less likely the possibility of trans-
parency becomes, and, to the degree that the translator is unaware of this problem,