Law, Language, and the Law School Classroom 19speak depends on the subtle structuring of large stretches of discourse in particu-
lar contexts, and on the actual mobilization of many levels of language in each usage.
Thus, we move to several other considerations that are important to our analysis.
In looking at the structuring of whole chunks of discourse, we move beyond
the skeletal background framework of grammar to the richer, still more contex-
tual domain that has been heavily studied by sociolinguists. Larger stretches of
discourse are responsive to contexts of many kinds: social (e.g., we are people of
unequal social power speaking in a classroom), generic (e.g., I am using the genre
known as storytelling, building on a shared cultural sense of stories we both have
heard), intralinguistic (e.g., I am playing this new image against the images of
my immediately preceding utterance, or using poetic structure to convey mean-
ing), speech-contextual (e.g., I am referring to previous contexts of speaking,^28
or to the one I am currently creating as I speak), and many more. Sociolinguist
John Gumperz has analyzed how speakers rely on subtle “contextualization cues”
to orient ongoing communication by pointing to these layers of context; linguistic
anthropologists such as Brenneis, Duranti, and Goodwin have looked at wider social
and metalinguistic structures and ideologies as also playing a crucial role.^29 This
larger structuring of discourse is not always something of which speakers are con-
sciously aware, so that conversation involves an astonishing coordination of back-
ground (often unselfconscious) cultural and linguistic knowledge with ongoing
conscious language use.
Here, then, is a meeting place for individual creative language usage and so-
cially shared structuring of language, at a level that is deeply cultural and only par-
tially available to conscious awareness.^30 How intriguing it is that so many of the
key political and ritual discourse forms in other cultures can structurally mirror,
in very subtle and complex ways, the very model of society or language that they
attempt to reinforce.^31 And, having recognized this link in “others,” anthropolo-
gists have returned to analyze a similar connection between language and politics
in the United States.^32 As we trace the ways that language and the polity mirror
one another, the line between linguistic structure as a “model of ” and a “model
for” the social world can blur, so that our analysis reveals the mutually reinforcing
role of political language and politics itself.^33 Taking this perspective into the legal
field as it is revealed in the law school classroom, we would similarly want to in-
vestigate the general structure of “law school classroom speech.” Is there a mes-
sage conveyed by law school classroom discourses? What kind of relationship to
different contexts, both inside and outside of the classroom, is set up by the struc-
ture of law school language?
Finally, even an examination of the contextual structure of discourse in the
abstract is a step away from the study of actual language use—which is a form of
action, of practice. What happens when speakers put these structures of grammar
and discourse to use? Some language theorists have neglected this question alto-
gether, perhaps viewing actual language use as entirely idiosyncratic or incapable
of being theorized.^34 However, in current scholarship, anthropological linguists and
sociolinguists are developing systematic ways to analyze linguistic performance,
examining the moment when speakers translate language structures and regulari-
ties into everyday use.^35 Along with some social theorists, philosophers, and legal