Len Gregory is a law school student. As part of his elite law
school's community outreach programme, he finds himself in a local
high school several times a week passing on his own legal knowledge
to the students in a course he teaches entitled Street Law. This
book shows that passing on legal knowledge is not the only thing
Len is doing in Street Law. He is also trying to get his students
to talk and argue about the law in the same way that he does.
Len talks about legal matters using hypothetical, speculative
scenarios played out by generic people - if people occur at all in
his scenarios. The students, meanwhile, recount anecdotes inhabited
by real people doing things in the real world. This book describes
how Len and the Street Law students negotiate Len's language
promotion project scheme, that is, how the students go along with
or resist Len's promotion. The consequences of this negotiation are
high: the abstract/speculative inquiry style promoted by Len
carries social value - to be able to talk as Len does is to be able
to talk as powerful members of society talk, and Len is offering
the Street Law students access to that social capital. However,
this book shows how the Street Law students identify
abstract/speculative inquiry as being the talk of the (elite,
white) Other - not, in other words, a way of talk that, by and
large, utters their social identity. The book examines this
negotiation and tension between learning economically powerful ways
of talking in the larger social marketplace and maintaining an
authentic local social identity.
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