Anthropologist and law professor Elizabeth Mertz takes us inside the first-year law classroom, unpacking the mysterious process by which law students learn to "think like lawyers." This process, which forces students to think and talk in radically new and different ways about conflicts, is directed by professors in the course of their lectures and examinations, and conducted via spoken and written language. Using linguistic analysis, this book tracks the relentless shift away from social and moral grounding that law students must undergo to become lawyers. Mertz bases her study on tape recordings from first year Contracts courses in eight different law schools.