ABSTRACT
Essentialist reasoning often surfaces in the everyday practice of the legal profession. This reasoning is reflected in many different ways. These may a set of misconceptions about defendants, a set of misconceptions about language, a set of instructions available in the handbooks on interrogation commonly available in legal institutions, and a set which manifests itself through the ideological affiliation of the lawyer. This chapter discusses each of these ways in which essentialist reasoning in law is realized. As Roger Shuy pointed out, a person preparing to listen to another person on a tape approaches the task with a number of preconceptions about the event recorded and the people whose deeds are to be analyzed. He explained the Reid technique also disregards intracultural social variation. According to the Reid technique, elaborate answers are to be viewed as deceptive behavior.
