where the teachers are attempting to shift students’ approach to discursive style itself, along
with accompanying ideologies of text and language. The mystique surrounding Socratic
training in law schools has survived generations of assaults by now; this study suggests some
reasons why that might be. At the same time, it demonstrates the multitude of ways pro-
fessors can convey the same message through a variety of discursive forms.
- Philips, Ideology, 28.
- Id., 85.
Chapter 6
- I except scholars who have examined the law school process critically and/or from
an empirical point of view—for example, Robert Granfield, whose sociological study of
law school education takes a somewhat similar approach to the question. Granfield, Mak-
ing Elite Lawyers. - See, e.g., Kahlenberg, Broken Contract; Kerlow, Poisoned Ivy; Granfield, Making Elite
Lawyers. - This is by no means unique to legal education. For example, the Gaelic speakers I
studied during my doctoral dissertation research had a phrase, “no burden to carry,” that
distilled an older linguistic ideology regarding their language. See Mertz, “Language and
Mind” and “No Burden to Carry.” - See, e.g., Erlanger and Klegon, “Socialization Effects”; Granfield, Making Elite
Lawyers; D. Kennedy, Legal Education. - Granfield, Making Elite Lawyers, 52.
- Id., 59, 98.
- For a discussion of the way language and language ideologies can act as filters for
social experience and the formulation of social identity, see Mertz, “Pragmatic and Semantic
Change” and “Sociolinguistic Creativity.” - On conceptualizing language as more than a transparent filter for legal interac-
tion, see Mertz, “Language, Law, and Social Meanings.” - See Sarat and Felstiner, Divorce Lawyers.
- See Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination.
- See Briggs, Disorderly Discourse; Matoesian, Law and the Language of Identity;
Parmentier, “The Political Function of Reported Speech”; Tannen, “Waiting for the
Mouse.” - Matoesian, Law and the Language of Identity, 111.
- Goffman, Forms of Talk.
- Id., 128.
- See Hanks, Referential Practice.
- Of course, this use of imagined direct quotation is not unique to law teaching;
it is also found in everyday conversation, as well as in other kinds of teaching. On the
one hand, it may have one kind of shared impact across many contexts; that is, it makes
the point more vividly, in essence dramatizing it. On the other hand, it is necessary to
examine each context carefully to understand the social, institutional, and normative
functions of proceeding in this more dramatic or vivid way. In this case, we are examin-
ing the metapragmatic meaning of a move into direct quotation in the particular con-
text of legal discourse and pedagogy. - Matoesian, Law and the Language of Identity, 105, 155–159.
- See Bennett and Feldman, Reconstructing Reality in the Courtroom; Pennington
and Hastie, “A Cognitive Theory of Juror Decisionmaking.” - Matoesian, Law and the Language of Identity, 107.
250 Notes to Pages 95–106