Granfield, Robert.

Making elite lawyers: visions of law at

Harvard and beyond. Routledge: Londres, 1992.

Chapter 1

Power and Politics in Legal Education

What is the book about?

The book is about “how law students at Harvard Law

School construct their views of law and legal practice.

It is an exploration into making elite lawyers”. [First

difference from my research: Harvard Law School has

the specific purpose of making lawyers. Brazilian Law

Schools in general – and São Francisco Law School

specifically – do not aim at educating their students to

become lawyers; they have a broader scope, which is to

educate them to “think in juridical terms”, as it is

frequently said. By that, they mean not to narrow one’s

professional path to lawyering, but to expand its

possibilities but enabling them to become lawyers,

public defenders, prosecutors, judges, and so on. I am

not sure if/how it relates to the “bachelor ideology”.

Second difference: my doctoral dissertation is about

how law school changes students’ legal consciousness. I

understand that lay people already have a legal

consciousness that can be altered by legal education].

What is it main thesis?

“The main thesis in this book is that a law school

education is deeply infused with ideological

assumptions regarding the nature of everyday social

life” (p.2) [It is a thesis similar to mine, but at same

time different since I understand that law itself

structures our daily lives and is structured by day-to-

day experiences. What does he mean by “the nature of

everyday life?”]. Law is knowledge: “it is a loose

collection of propositions that constitute and reify

ideas about such principles as rights, authority,

obligations and justice. Law then is ideological and

study law in the halls of American law schools is to

engage in a course of study in ideology”(p.2). [So, Law

is an ideology. It seems to me that Silbey disagrees with

that. Study more.]

What does he understand by ideology?

The author presents the reader the notion of ideology

offered by the structuralism; he also introduces us to

the reason why it is often criticized: According to this

view, “ideas and beliefs that legitimate social

inequality have been seen as residing somewhere in the

material conditions operating within sundry

institutions that indoctrinate individuals within

capitalist logic. (…) This view of ideology considers

that various social institutions, such as education and

law, advance a set of arbitrary beliefs that serve to

reproduce hegemonic forms of social orders. This

approach mystifies ideology by not accounting for the

interactional basis of its production and

consumption”. (p.2) He does not explain clearly what

he understands by ideology. Rather, he suggests that

ideology is a set of ideas that enables one to make sense

of the world: “ways in which collective meanings are

produced through the framework of thought

individuals use to interpret and understand the social

world around them and their structural location

within it” (p.3).

So, when he says, “study law in the halls of American

law schools is to engage in a course of study in

ideology”, he means, “school cultures operates as

regularized systems of meaning that often contain

zones of indeterminacy and ambiguity to which

ideologies permit various forms of situational

adjustments that make meaningful the contradictions

and asymmetries of social life. Culture is what is stated,

ideology is what is acted through and taken for

granted; it is the medium through which consciousness

and meaningfulness operate” (p.4).