Anyone who has attended law school knows that it invokes an important
intellectual transformation, frequently referred to as "learning to think
like a lawyer". This process, which forces students to think and talk in
radically new and different ways about conflicts, is directed by professors
in the course of their lectures and examinations, and conducted via spoken
and written language.


Beth Mertz's book is the first study to truly delve into that language to
reveal the complexities of how this process takes place. Mertz bases her
linguistic study on tape recordings from her first year Contracts courses
in eight different law schools. She knows how all these schools employ
the Socratic method between teacher and student, forcing the student to
shift away from moral and emotional terms in thinking about conflict,
toward frameworks of legal authority instead. This move away from moral
frameworks is key, she says, arguing that it represents an underlying world
view at the core not just of law education, but for better or worse, of the
entire US legal system - which, while providing a useful source of legitimacy
and a means to process conflict, 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.

Written within the tradition of anthropological lingustics, Mertz's work.
the first to study law school in this sort of detail.will appeal to a wide
spectrum of readers interested in the intersection of law, language, and
society: sociolinguists; anthropologists; feminist, race, and social
theorists, and law professors.

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