Legal Language and American Law 221clinically based education that attempts to prepare students for trials, mediations,
and client interviews.^51 However, as even the most ardent advocates of alternative
approaches to legal training admit, the linguistic system that I have outlined in this
book remains the lingua franca through which all attorneys must at some point
operate, and so cannot be easily dismissed or ignored.^52
The great question here, as in so many other domains of this society, remains
whether it is possible to keep the powerful positive aspects of one side of this
double edge without having also to accept the deleterious aspects of the other
side. This is a question that has obvious global dimensions, as the hegemony of
Western approaches to law, justice, and social context undergoes ever more rapid
expansion internationally.^53 Of course, its impact in each part of the world will
work through particular mediations dictated in part by local circumstances, and
the hegemonic vision will itself shift and be partially reconstructed in this pro-
cess.^54 But as we see the inexorable march of social change that spreads the “rule
of law” but also carries with it deepening class disparities, widespread dissolu-
tion of older forms of social cohesion and accompanying normative grounding,
and in some cases increased criminal violence, the task of analyzing this particu-
lar aspect of a hegemonic ideology takes on added urgency.^55 The double edge of
legal reasoning uncovered in U.S. law school classroom discourse offers the pos-
sibilities but also the dangers that come with this move to a particular form of
abstraction, which can erase those aspects of social context that lead to bias, but
can also obliterate aspects of the social surround that permit an in-depth under-
standing of social inequalities. Facing this dilemma is a crucial task for any legal
system with democratic ideals, and it is a core challenge confronting those using
the legal language through which such a system operates. Whether through di-
rect export of American legalism, or through its indirect effect on U.S. legal-
political attitudes and policies, this challenge is rapidly reaching far beyond the
geographic borders of the United States.
What, then, are we to make of this powerful, linguistically circumscribed sys-
tem of legal knowledge? Through linguistic analysis we can see the centrality of
discursive patterning and ideologies of language to wider social processes. In some
cases, as we have noted, the web of language surrounding legal decision making
can be viewed as a protection for those with less power. On the other hand, there
is cause for concern regarding systematic exclusion or marginalization of the very
aspects of social context that might matter most to the powerless. If those wielding
the analogies and formulating the linguistic ideologies tend to be relatively homo-
geneous in terms of race, gender, class, and other socially situated features of iden-
tity, then there is less chance that alternative views and approaches will be heard.
(This directs our attention to the elites in the legal profession as particularly im-
portant sources of decisions about the construction of legal frames.) The very con-
struction of fact from complex contexts, as well as the selection of salient facts for
analogical reasoning, tacitly draws on deeply cultural assumptions (although the
process represents itself as natural and neutral).^56 It seems unlikely that we will be
able to achieve a truly democratic legal system with a homogeneous judiciary guid-
ing this process, or with homogeneous legal education setting the scene for what
transpires as law students enter the profession.