- Id., 72–74.
- Or, in some cases, a text-artifact can be the physical rendition of the text in speech
and/or action. - Silverstein, “Secret Lives of Texts,” 81 and passim; see also Silverstein and Urban,
“Natural History.” Thus, if I read you a story about the history of a clan, or the legal profes-
sion, we could distinguish (1) a text-artifact (the written story); (2) a number of possible
denotational texts, centered on the content of the story (the meaning each teller and listener
takes from the story; think, perhaps, of asking multiple listeners to retell the story after I’ve
read it, and then analyzing how the various “Rorschachs” we generate from this exercise do
and don’t overlap); and (3) a number of possible “interactional” texts, centered on what I
am doing when I read the story (e.g., initiating you into the clan or the legal profession,
warning you about the dangers of the past so that you will behave differently now). Note,
then, that as in so many instances of linguistically generated meaning, there is a metalevel
structuring that forms the backbone of how we create and understand “texts.”
I have chosen not to use the more technical vocabulary throughout this volume but,
as noted, have generally indicated the distinction between text-artifact and other kinds of
text by speaking of the written texts found in legal opinions and casebooks when talking
about legal text-artifacts. It is also interesting to note that, again on a more technical level,
the method used here does not allow me to generate an account of group interactions such
as classes in terms of the individual participants’ denotational or interactional texts. (In-
deed, it is difficult to imagine doing this in any fine-grained, ongoing way, for any sub-
stantial group of people.) The interviews whose results are reported in Chapter 7 do give
us some sense of possible points of differentiation along these dimensions. But my pri-
mary emphasis here is on the institutional level and the ways patterned institutional dis-
course styles reregiment participants’ orientations to the reading of text-artifacts more
superficially, and, further, to the entextualization, recontextualization, and interpretation
of conflict stories or texts and other legally relevant social narratives. - The authority of previously written legal cases also depends on the status of the
court from which the opinion was issued. In the federal court system, for example, an
opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court would have more authority as precedent than an opin-
ion of one of the intermediate federal appellate courts (e.g., the First or Second, etc., Cir-
cuit Courts of Appeal). - When I speak of the precedential “text,” I want to point to the conflation in na-
tive ideology of what Silverstein would call text-artifact with the texts that are in play in
the process of making precedents. This conflation is encouraged by the fact that there is
frequently a heavy focus on a precise word or phrase from the original text-artifact, so that
a linguistic formula such as “inherently dangerous” is literally repeated in the new text-
artifact. This reification of and focus on “surface segmental” aspects of the language, where
written tokens of the type are taken as iconic with (indeed identical with, unmediated by
text) each other, is an instance of the ideological predisposition for reference discussed in
Chapter 2, note 34. - A more precise articulation of the way the legal “classification changes as the clas-
sification is made,” as Levi puts it, is more readily achieved by using the analytic frame-
work provided by linguistic anthropology than by using the “indigenous” legal theoretic
approach, even of the more sophisticated variety. As noted previously, legal scholars and
practitioners seem to have difficulty holding onto both aspects of the process at once, thus
sliding alternatively into naïve referential reification and skeptical nihilism. See Mertz and
Weissbourd, “Rule-Centrism versus Legal Creativity”; Winter, “A Clearing in the Forest,” - Nor does legal theory provide a clear framework for sorting out how legal language
operates in the process of entextualization and recontextualization.
242 Notes to Pages 45–46