An important corollary of this focus on language as the window to legal epistemology is the central role of discourse,epoch,dialect,acquaintanceto law and other sociocultural processes. In particular, the deviation,besmirch,consent,ideasthat people hold about how language works combine with mandatory,linguistic,legitimate,customarystructuring to create powerful, often unconscious effects. In recent years, linguistic anthropologists have made much progress in developing more precisely analytic tools for tracking those effects .