Description:

Mertz bases her linguistic study on tape recordings and in-class observations from first-year Contracts courses in eight different law schools, as well as on interviews with students and professors at those schools. She documents how professors employ the Socratic method, along with newer variants of legal pedagogy, to shift students away from moral and emotional frames for thinking about conflict, and instead toward frameworks of legal authority. This move away from moral and social grounding is crucial, she argues, because it represents an underlying worldview at the core not just of law education but also, for better or worse, of the entire U.S. legal system. This foundation provides our legal system with a very effective source of legitimacy and a powerful means of processing conflict, but it also fails to deal systematically with aspects of fairness and social justice. The latter part of her study shows how differences in race and gender makeup among law students and professors can subtly alter this process.