This is a study whose genesis dates back to the day I first took my seat in a Contracts classroom as a first-year law student, and that came to fruition as I for the first time taught Contracts to first-year law students. Having participated in both ends of the process has added depth to my understanding of the law school experience. As a first-year student, I took notes in my Contracts class in two columns; the first kept track of the concepts my professor was endeavoring to impress on us, and the second was a running anthropologist’s commentary on the studies that someone should do to investigate the social and linguistic processes at work in contract law—and in legal reasoning generally. This work is an initial effort to investigate the distinctive shape of a core U.S. legal worldview, empirically grounded in the study of the language through which law students are trained to this new approach.

这项研究的起源可以追溯到我第一次在合同教室就座的那一天，当时我还是一年级的法学学生，这项研究在我第一次向一年级的法学学生教授合同时取得了成果。参与了这两个过程的两端，加深了我对法学院经验的理解。作为一名一年级学生，我在合同课上做了两个专栏的笔记；第一个专栏记录了教授试图给我们留下深刻印象的概念，第二个是一位人类学家对一些人应该做的研究的评论，这些研究是为了调查合同法和法律推理中的社会和语言过程。这项工作是一个初步的努力，以调查一个核心的美国法律世界观的独特形态，在经验基础上，通过学习语言，法律专业的学生是通过培训这种新的方法。