Abstract
INTRODUCTION The literature of lawyering is far reaching, encompassing doctrine, ethics, institutions, and advocacy. In recent years, scholars intent on bridging the divide between theory and practice have enriched this literature by drawing on interdisciplinary work in anthropology, linguistics, and sociology. This integration has opened up new visions of lawyer/client discourse, interpretation, and practice. The visions reflect the postmodern turn to contest, contingency, exclusion, hierarchy, multiplicity, partiality, and plasticity. 1 This turn has begun to reveal a sociolegal world of lawyer/client discourse -- voices, narratives, stories -- that is contested. In this world, lawyer knowledge is partial; lawyer interpretation is contingent upon multiple categories of age, class, disability, ethnicity, gender, race, and sexual orientation; and lawyer/client relations are configured by a dominant-subordinate hierarchy of exclusion. Accordingly, the practices of lawyering -- interviewing, counseling, negotiation, litigation -- appear not as the neutral conventions of a skilled craft, but rather as unstable interpersonal and institutional contexts for the play of lawyer power and client resistance. This postmodern analysis has begun to erode the modernist foundations of lawyering. 2 These foundations embody commitments to express historical forms of lawyer/client discourse, interpretation, and practice. The forms construct a modernist aesthetic marked by a devotion to craft, reason, understanding, and text. Carried on by tradition, craft invests normative value in the professional skills and attitudes of lawyering. Reason includes logic and pragmatism in that value system. Understanding adds the norms of empathy and self-reflection. The good ...