Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T11:39:45.509Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Coffee House: Habitus and Performance Among Law Students

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Desmond Manderson  and
Sarah Turner
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Judith Butler, we develop a detailed ethnography of a social space in a major law school and explore its socialization of the students there. “Coffee House” is a weekly social event sponsored by Canadian law firms and offering free drink and food to the students present. We argue that this event and the actors involved profoundly change student identities and alter educational aspirations. Although the students themselves insist that “nothing is going on,” our ethnography suggests that in “Coffee House” identity is developed through performances, and in the accumulation of symbolic capital, until ultimately students come to feel their future career path is not a matter of choice, but destiny. We explore the important work of Bourdieu through this setting, but ultimately we resist his determinism, and suggest instead that, following the work of Butler, identity is a more complicated and fluid dynamic between space, repetition, and performance. It appears that a personal unconscious transformation among law students attending Coffee House is underway; yet opportunities to change the meaning of this space and these performances remain.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , Summer 2006 , pp. 649 - 676
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2006 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Arthurs, Harry. 1985. Without the Law. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Bachelard, Gaston. 1994. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Blomley, Nicholas, David, Delaney, and Richard, T. Ford, eds. 2001. The Legal Geographies Reader: Law, Power, and Space. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.Google Scholar
Blomley, Nicholas. 1994. Law, Space, and the Geographies of Power. New York: Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Bordo, Susan. 1989. The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity. In Gender/Body/Knowledge, ed. Jaggar, Alison and Bordo, Susan. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1988. Homo Academicus. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Passeron, Jean-Claude. 1990. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodes That Matter. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Calhoun, Craig. 1992. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Castiglione, Baldesar. 1967 1528. The Book of the Courtier, trans. Bull, George. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.Google Scholar
Cownie, Fiona. 2004. Legal Academics: Culture and Identities. Oxford: Hart.Google Scholar
Dammayer, Matthew, and Nunez, Narina. 1999. Anxiety and Depression Among Law Students Current Knowledge and Future Directions. Law and Human Behavior 23:55.Google Scholar
De Sousa Santos, Boaventura. 1995. Towards a New Common Sense. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology, trans. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and Difference, trans. Bass, Alan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 1990. Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority. Cardozo Law Review 11:919.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 1992. Before the Law. In Derida, Jacques, Acts of Literature, trans. Attridge, Derek. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Dworkin, Ronald. 1986. Laws Empire. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.Google Scholar
Elden, Stuart. 2001. Politics, Philosophy, Geography. In Lefebvre, Henri, Scholarship, Recent Anglo-American. Antipode 33:809.Google Scholar
Elkins, James. 1983. Becoming a Lawyer: The Transformation of Self During Legal Education. Soundings 66:450.Google Scholar
Ellickson, Robert. 1991. Order Without Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Ellis, Markman. n.d. An Introduction to the Coffee-House. A discursive model. http://www.kahve-house.com/coffeebook.pdf.Google Scholar
Ellis, Markman. 2004. The Coffee House: A Cultural History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.Google Scholar
Eron, Leonard, and Redmont, R. 1957. The Effect of Legal Education on Attitudes. Journal of Legal Education 9:431.Google Scholar
Flessas, Tatiana. 2005. The Haunted House of Justice. In Special Issue: Legal Spaces, ed. Manderson, Desmond. Law Text Culture 9:215–44.Google Scholar
Ford, Richard. 1994. The Boundaries of Race. Political Geography in Legal Analysis. Harvard Law Review 107:1841.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1976. Il faut défendre la societé. Cours détudes 1975–76. Paris: Gallimard, Seuil.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Sheridan, Alan. NewYork: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. 1991. Civilization and Its Discontents. In Civilization, Society and Religion, 243–340. London: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving. 1956. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving. 1963. Behavior in Public Places. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Goodrich, Peter. 1990. Languages of Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.Google Scholar
Granfield, Robert. 1991. Making It by Faking It. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 20:331.Google Scholar
Granfield, Robert, and Koenig, Thomas. 1992a. Learning Collective Eminence. Sociological Quarterly 33:503.Google Scholar
Granfield, Robert, and Koenig, Thomas. 1992b. The Fate of Elite Idealism. Social Problems 39:315.Google Scholar
Gregson, Nick, and Rose, Gillian. 2000. Taking Butler Elsewhere. Environment and Planning D. Society and Space 18:433.Google Scholar
Griffiths, John. 1986. What Is Legal Pluralism ? Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 24:1.Google Scholar
Habermas, Jurgen. 1992. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Burger, Thomas. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Haldar, Piyel. 1999. The Function of Ornament in Court Architecture. In Law and the Image, ed. Douzinas, Costas and Neal, Linda. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Hart, HLA. 1961. The Concept of Law. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Hedegard, James. 1979. The Impact of Legal Education. ABA Research Journal 4:791.Google Scholar
Kafka, Franz. 1993. Collected Stories, trans. Wilma and, Edwin Muir. New York: Everyman's Library.Google Scholar
Kahn, Paul. 1999. The Cultural Study of Law. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Kelsen, Hans. 1934-35. The Pure Theory of Law. Law Quarterly Review 50 & 51:1.Google Scholar
Kennedy, Duncan. 1982. Legal Education as Training in Hierarchy. In The Politics of Law, ed. Kairys, David, New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
King, Anthony. 2000. Thinking With Bourdieu Against Bourdieu. Sociological Theory 18:417.Google Scholar
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1969. The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John and, Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Macdonald, Roderick. 1986. Vers la reconnaissance d'une normativité implicite et inférentielle. Sociologie et Sociétés 17:37.Google Scholar
Macdonald, Roderick. 1990. Office Politics. University of Toronto Law Journal 40:419.Google Scholar
Macdonald, Roderick. 2002. Lessons of Everyday Law. Montréal: McGill-Queens University Press.Google Scholar
Manderson, Desmond. 2003. From Hunger to Love. Law & Literature 15:87.Google Scholar
Manderson, Desmond. 2006. Proximity, Levinas, and the Soul of Law. Montréal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press.Google Scholar
Merry, Sally, ed. 1993. The Possibility of Popular Justice: A Case Study of American Community Mediation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Mohr, Richard. 2003. Law and Identity in Spatial Contexts. National Identities 5:53.Google Scholar
Mohr, Richard. 2005. Territory, Landscape, and Law. In Geography of Law, ed. Taylor, W. Oxford: Hart.Google Scholar
Nairn, Karen. 1996. Parties on Geography Fieldtrips. New Zealand Womens Studies Journal 12:86.Google Scholar
Nelson, Lise. 1999. Bodies and Spaces Do Matter. Gender, Place and Culture 6:331.Google Scholar
Parker, Andrew, and Sedgwick, Eve. 1993. Performativity and Performance. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Penner, James. 1997. The Idea of Property in Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Pile, Steve, and Nigel, Thrift. 1995. Mapping the Subject. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Robinson, Phil, dir. 1989. Field of Dreams.Google Scholar
Rose, Gillian. 1999. Performing Space. In Human Geography Today, ed. Massey et al., Dorothy Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Salecl, Renata. 2004. On Anxiety. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Shields, R. 1999. Lefebvre Love and Struggle: Spatial Dialectics. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Shusterman, Richard, ed. 1999. Bourdieu: A Critical Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Soja, Edward. 1996. Thirdspace. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Soja, Edward. 1999. Thirdspace. In Human Geography Today, ed. Massey et al., Dorothy New York: Polity.Google Scholar
Thompson, E. P. 1991. Customs in Common. London: Merlin Press.Google Scholar
Valentine, Gill. 2001. Social Geographies: Space and Society. Harlow: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Wacquant, Loïc. 1990. Sociology as Socioanalysis. Sociological Forum 5:677.Google Scholar