ABSTRACT
This chapter presents two extracts, each of which explores what it means to describe the language of lawyers as a specialised, acquired 'rhetoric'. First extract examines the training in language that law students receive before they qualify. Rather than focusing, as in advocacy manuals, on particular techniques, the extract explores a deeper, ideological process that brings about a change in how students believe language works. Second extract also looks beyond 'rhetoric' in law as being only concerned with specific verbal techniques. It develops a social view of a kind of 'constitutive rhetoric': an ordered but evolving system of communicative rules and values that reproduce and develop legal culture. Elizabeth Mertz presents observation data collected from various American law schools. She analyses how becoming a lawyer involves learning to shift one's 'attention away from accustomed social contextual anchors and toward new legal-contextual frameworks'.
