Critical Legal Studies

Critical legal studies (CLS) is a liberal movement of law professors founded in 1977 at a conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.^[1] Its central tenet is that the logic and structure of law are actually no more than a means by which the powerful in society oppress the lower classes. These scholars see the law as something that perpetuates and legitimizes societal injustices, and they argue that the rich use the law as an instrument for oppression. CLS advocates view law as politics, and insist that it is absurd to view the law as being neutral or value free. CLS supporters seek to change the law in order to remake social structures.

CLS theorists include Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Robert W. Gordon, Morton J. Horwitz, Duncan Kennedy, and Katherine A. MacKinnon. The movement thrived at Harvard Law School in the late 1980s until traditional faculty members succeeded in denying tenure to at least one member of the CLS movement.

CLS is an American movement but cites as authority the German social theorists Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Max Weber, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse and the Italian marxist Antonio Gramsci. The work of French theorists Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida have also been influential in the movement.

The Legal Realism movement of the 1920s and 1930s is seen by some as a precursor to the CLS movement, because legal realists also urged analysis of the law within a broader social context.

Today there are splinter groups within or without CLS that include feminist legal theory and Critical race theory (CRT).^[2]

References[edit]

1. ↑ http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/index.php/Critical_legal_theory
2. ↑ http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~jp49/