Losing Portia’s Voice: The Metapragmatic Evaluations of “Quiet” and “Loud” Female Law Students in US Mock Trial Competitions

Abstract

In US law schools, students not only learn how to “think” like a lawyer (Mertz 2007), but they also learn to “sound” like one using proper voice qualities. This article analyzes the discourses of mock trial judges who admonished female law students for their perceived lack or excess of acoustic amplitude or speech volume. Rather than explicitly comment that female law students sounded too “quiet” or too “loud,” however, the judges used two different discourses to comment on female law students’ voice quality. They employed direct metapragmatic discourse, voicing female law students in their role as attorneys, to negatively evaluate their low speech volume. Alternatively, the judges applied storytelling as an implicit metapragmatic discourse to comment on female law students whom they perceived as speaking too loud, articulating gendered ideologies about courtroom language that suggest that loud women break norms of courtroom speech decorum. An investigation into the metapragmatics of voice quality thus reveals that the mock trial experience can be doubly marginalizing for female law students: direct metapragmatics associates their low volume with weakness, and implicit metapragmatics associates their high volume with negative, unfeminine, and unlawyerly traits.