Critical legal studies (CLS) is a school of
critical theory
A critical theory is any approach to social philosophy that focuses on society and culture to reveal, critique and challenge power structures. With roots in sociology and literary criticism, it argues that social problems stem more from soci ...
that developed in the United States during the 1970s.
[Alan Hunt, "The Theory of Critical Legal Studies," Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1986): 1-45, esp. 1, 5. Se]
DOI, 10.1093/ojls/6.1.1. CLS adherents claim that laws are devised to maintain the
status quo
is a Latin phrase meaning the existing state of affairs, particularly with regard to social, political, religious or military issues. In the sociological sense, the ''status quo'' refers to the current state of social structure and/or values. W ...
of society and thereby codify its biases against marginalized groups.
Despite wide variation in the opinions of critical legal scholars around the world, there is general consensus regarding the key goals of Critical Legal Studies:
* to demonstrate the
ambiguity
Ambiguity is the type of meaning in which a phrase, statement or resolution is not explicitly defined, making several interpretations plausible. A common aspect of ambiguity is uncertainty. It is thus an attribute of any idea or statement ...
and possible
preferential outcomes of supposedly impartial and rigid
legal doctrine
A legal doctrine is a framework, set of rules, Procedural law, procedural steps, or Test (law), test, often established through precedent in the common law, through which judgments can be determined in a given legal case. A doctrine comes about w ...
s.
* to publicize historical, social, economic and psychological
results
A result is the outcome of an event.
Result or Results may also refer to: Music
* Results (album), ''Results'' (album), a 1989 album by Liza Minnelli
* ''Results'', a 2012 album by Murder Construct
* "The Result", a single by The Upsetters
* "The ...
of
legal decisions
* to demystify
legal analysis and
legal culture
Legal cultures are described as being temporary outcomes of interactions and occur pursuant to a challenge and response paradigm. Analyses of core legal paradigms shape the characteristics of individual and distinctive legal cultures.
"Comparative ...
in order to impose
transparency on legal processes so that they earn the general support of
socially responsible citizens
The abbreviations "CLS" and "Crit" are sometimes used to refer to the movement and its adherents.
Influence
Considered "the first movement in legal theory and legal scholarship in the
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...
to have espoused a committed Left political stance and perspective",
critical legal studies was committed to shaping society based on a vision of human personality devoid of the hidden interests and class domination that CLS scholars argued are at the root of liberal legal institutions in the West.
[Turley, Jonathan. "Hitchhiker's Guide to CLS, Unger, and Deep Thought". ''Northwestern University Law Review'' 81 (1987): 593-620, esp. "Introduction: Roberto Unger's Politics, A Work in Constructive Social Theory," pp. 593-595 erified and 423. Quote: "At its most basic level, the CLS movement challenges society to consider some ultimate questions about the validity of its own institutions and to reconsider some past 'ultimate answers' upon which those institutions are based."] According to CLS scholars
Duncan Kennedy and Karl Klare, critical legal studies was "concerned with the relationship of legal scholarship and practice to the struggle to create a more humane, egalitarian, and democratic society."
[Duncan Kennedy and Karl E. Klare, "A Bibliography of Critical Legal Studies," Yale Law Journal, Vol. 94 (1984): 461.]
During its period of peak influence, the critical legal studies movement caused considerable controversy within the legal academy. Members such as
Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Roberto Mangabeira Unger (; born 24 March 1947) is a Brazilian philosopher and politician. His work is in the tradition of classical social theory and pragmatism, and is developed across many fields including legal theory, philosophy and religion ...
have sought to rebuild these institutions as an expression of human coexistence and not just a provisional truce in a brutal struggle and were seen as the most powerful voices and the only way forward for the movement.
[ Unger and other members of the movement continue to try to develop it in new directions, e.g., to make legal analysis the basis of developing institutional alternatives.][Unger, Roberto Mangabeira, ''The Critical Legal Studies Movement''. New York:Verso, 2015.]
History
Although the intellectual origins of the critical legal studies (CLS) can be generally traced to American legal realism
Legal realism is a naturalistic approach to law. It is the view that jurisprudence should emulate the methods of natural science, i.e., rely on empirical evidence. Hypotheses must be tested against observations of the world.
Legal realists be ...
, as a distinct scholarly movement CLS fully emerged only in the late 1970s. Many first-wave American CLS scholars entered legal education, having been profoundly influenced by the experiences of the civil rights movement, women's rights movement, and the anti-war movement of the 1960s and 1970s. What started off as a critical stance towards American domestic politics eventually translated into a critical stance towards the dominant legal ideology of modern Western society. Drawing on both domestic theory and the work of European social theorists, the "crits" sought to demystify what they saw as the numerous myths at the heart of mainstream legal thought and practice.
The British critical legal studies movement started roughly at a similar time as its American counterpart. However, it centered around a number of conferences held annually, particularly the Critical Legal Conference and the National Critical Lawyers Group. There remain a number of fault lines in the community; between theory and practice, between those who look to Marxism
Marxism is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a Materialism, materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand S ...
and those who worked on Deconstruction
The term deconstruction refers to approaches to understanding the relationship between text and meaning. It was introduced by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who defined it as a turn away from Platonism's ideas of "true" forms and essences w ...
, between those who look to explicitly political engagements and those who work in aesthetics and ethics.
In France, where the legal tradition had been closely guarded by law faculties and watched over by Napoleonic institutions such as the Court of Cassation
A court of cassation is a high-instance court that exists in some judicial systems. Courts of cassation do not re-examine the facts of a case, they only interpret the relevant law. In this they are appellate courts of the highest instance. In th ...
, the Conseil d'Etat, and the Ecole Nationale De la Magistrature, famed sociologist Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu (; 1 August 1930 – 23 January 2002) was a French sociologist and public intellectual. Bourdieu's contributions to the sociology of education, the theory of sociology, and sociology of aesthetics have achieved wide influence i ...
caused an uproar when he released his "La Force De La Loi, Elements Pour Une Sociologie du Champ Juridique" in 1986 - translated as "The Force of Law: Toward a Sociology of the Juridical Field", in the Hastings Law Journal
Hastings Law Journal is the oldest law journal at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. It began in 1949 in San Francisco, California. As of 1997, it is under the umbrella of the O'Brien Center for Scholarly Publications.
Th ...
(1987). It heralded the beginning of continental Critical Legal Studies.
Relation to American legal realism
Critical legal studies had its intellectual origins in the American legal realist movement in the 1930s. Prior to the 1930s, American jurisprudence had been dominated by a formalist account of how courts decide cases, an account which held that judges decide cases on the basis of distinctly legal rules and reasons that justify a unique result. The legal realists argued that statutory and case law is indeterminate, and that appellate courts decide cases not based upon law, but upon what they deem fair in light of the facts of a case. Considered "the most important jurisprudential movement of the 20th century", American legal realism sent a shock through American legal scholarship by undermining the formalist tenets that were long considered a bedrock of jurisprudence.
The influence of legal realism unsettled American jurisprudence for decades. Alan Hunt writes that the period "between the realism of the 1930s and the emergence of critical legal studies in the late 1970s has been a series of unsuccessful attempts to recover from the shock of realism some basis for a legal theory which articulates an image of the objectivity of the legal process, even though the explanation offered by post-realism had to be more complex than that provided by a doctrine of rule-following."[
]
As a literature and a network
The critical legal studies movement emerged in the mid-1970s as a network of leftist law professors in the United States who developed the realist indeterminacy thesis in the service of leftist ideals. According to Roberto Unger, the movement "continued as an organized force only until the late 1980s. Its life as a movement lasted for barely more than a decade."[Unger 2015, p. 24.]
Duncan Kennedy, a Harvard law professor who along with Unger was one of the key figures in the movement, has said that, in the early days of critical legal studies, "just about everyone in the network was a white male with some interest in 60s style radical politics or radical sentiment of one kind or another. Some came from Marxist backgrounds — some came from democratic reform."[Gerard J. Clark, "A Conversation with Duncan Kennedy," The Advocate: The Suffolk University Law School Journal, Vol. 24, No. 2 (1994): 56-61. Se]
Kennedy has emphasized the twofold nature of critical legal studies, as both a network of leftist scholar/activists and a scholarly literature:
itical legal studies has two aspects. It’s a scholarly literature and it has also been a network of people who were thinking of themselves as activists in law school politics. Initially, the scholarly literature was produced by the same people who were doing law school activism. Critical legal studies is not a theory. It’s basically this literature produced by this network of people. I think you can identify some themes of the literature, themes that have changed over time.
Scholars affiliated with critical legal studies often identified with the movement in several ways: by including in their articles an opening footnote mentioning the Conference on Critical Legal Studies and providing the organization's contact information, by attending conferences of the CCLS, and by citing the work of fellow critical legal studies scholars. A 1984 bibliography of CLS works, compiled by Duncan Kennedy and Karl Klare and published in the Yale Law Journal, included dozens of authors and hundreds of works.
A 2011 collection of four volumes edited by Costas Douzinas and Colin Perrin, with the assistance of J-M Barreto, compiles the work of the British Critical Legal Studies, including their philosophical mentors. It showcases scholarship elaborated since its origins in the late 1980s in areas such as legal philosophy
Philosophy of law is a branch of philosophy that examines the nature of law and law's relationship to other systems of norms, especially ethics and political philosophy. It asks questions like "What is law?", "What are the criteria for legal vali ...
, literature, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, feminism, gender, sexuality, post-colonialism, race, ethics, politics and human rights.[Douzinas, Costas and Perrin, Colin. Critical Legal Theory, London: Routledge, 2011. Se]
Prominent participants in the CLS movement include Derrick Bell
Derrick Albert Bell Jr. (November 6, 1930 – October 5, 2011) was an American lawyer, professor, and civil rights activist. Bell worked for first the U.S. Justice Department, then the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where he supervised over 300 scho ...
, Drucilla Cornell, Mark Kelman
Mark Kelman (born August 20, 1951) is jurist and vice dean of Stanford Law School. As a prominent legal scholar, he has applied social science methodologies, including economics and psychology, to the study of law. He is one of the most cited law ...
, Alan Hunt, Catharine MacKinnon
Catharine Alice MacKinnon (born October 7, 1946) is an American radical feminist legal scholar, activist, and author. She is the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, where she has been tenured since 1990, a ...
, Duncan Kennedy, David Kennedy, Martti Koskenniemi
Martti Antero Koskenniemi (born 18 March 1953) is a Finnish international lawyer and former diplomat. Currently he is professor of International Law in the University of Helsinki and Director of the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law an ...
, Gary Peller
Gary Peller (born 1955) is Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center and a prominent member of the critical legal studies and critical race theory movements.
Education and early career
Peller received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Emo ...
, Peter Fitzpatrick, Morton Horwitz, Jack Balkin
Jack M. Balkin (born August 13, 1956) is an American legal scholar. He is the Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School. Balkin is the founder and director of the Yale Information Society Project (ISP), a r ...
, Costas Douzinas Costas Douzinas ( el, Κώστας Δουζίνας; born 1951) is a professor of law, a founder of the Birkbeck School of Law and the Department of Law of the University of Cyprus, the founding director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities ...
, Karl Klare
Karl E. Klare is a Matthews Distinguished University Professor of labor and employment law and legal theory at Northeastern University School of Law in Boston, Massachusetts, and the current coordinator of the International Network on Transform ...
, Peter Gabel, Roberto Unger
Roberto Mangabeira Unger (; born 24 March 1947) is a Brazilian philosopher and politician. His work is in the tradition of classical social theory and pragmatism, and is developed across many fields including legal theory, philosophy and religion ...
, Renata Salecl
Renata Salecl (born 1962) is a Slovene philosopher, sociologist and legal theorist. She is a senior researcher at the Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law at the University of Ljubljana, and holds a professorship at Birkbeck College, Univ ...
, Mark Tushnet
Mark Victor Tushnet (born 18 November 1945) is an American legal scholar. He specializes in constitutional law and theory, including comparative constitutional law, and is currently the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Harvard Law Sch ...
, Louis Michael Seidman
Louis Michael Seidman (born 1947) is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C., a widely read constitutional law scholar and major proponent of the critical legal studies movemen ...
, John Strawson
John Strawson is an author and law professor at the University of East London School of Law, where he teaches International law and Middle East Studies.Jurisprudence of jurisdiction By Shaun McVeigh. Routledge, 2007. p. viii He specialises in t ...
and Martha Fineman
Martha Albertson Fineman (born 1943) is an American jurist, legal theorist and political philosopher. She is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law. Fineman was previously the first holder of the Dorothea S. Clar ...
.
Intellectual and political context
Roberto Unger, a key member of critical legal studies whose influence had continued to be far-reaching in the decades following the movement's decline, has written that the founders of critical legal studies "never meant it to become an ongoing school of thought or genre of writing. They wanted to intervene in a particular circumstance ..."[
That circumstance was the dominant practice of legal analysis which Unger calls the "method of reasoned elaboration". A close descendant of nineteenth-century doctrinal formalism, which sought through legal analysis to identify the "inbuilt legal content of a ... free society", the method of reasoned elaboration treated law materials as containing an "ideal element", an inherent legal substance underlying the contradictions and ambiguities in the law's text. Under the practice of reasoned elaboration, this inherent legal substance forms a prescriptive system that judges gradually uncover by reasoning through the policies and principles of law without questioning the "basic institutional arrangements of the market economy, of democratic politics, and of civil society outside the market and the state".
Reasoned elaboration was a pernicious influence for several reasons, Unger and others argued: it de-emphasized the contingent nature of law as a product of deals and compromise, instead treating it as containing a coherent prescriptive system that needed simply to be uncovered by legal interpretation; it obscured how judges usurp authority by denying their own role in making law; and finally, reasoned elaboration inhibited the use of law as a mechanism of social change.
In addition to the context of legal interpretation, critical legal studies also emerged in response to its political context, namely a setting in which the social-democratic settlement that was finalized after World War II had become canonical, and active dispute over the organization of society severely declined, effectively enshrining a reigning consensus about social organization that Unger describes as including a "combination of neoliberal orthodoxy, state capitalism, and compensatory redistribution by tax and transfer." Critical legal scholars challenged that consensus and sought to use legal theory as a means to explore alternative forms of social and political organization.
In accordance with the ]Critical rationalism
Critical rationalism is an epistemological philosophy advanced by Karl Popper on the basis that, if a statement cannot be logically deduced (from what is known), it might nevertheless be possible to logically falsify it. Following Hume, Poppe ...
the German jurist Reinhold Zippelius
Reinhold Zippelius (born 19 May 1928) is a German jurist and law scholar. Now retired, he was formerly the professor of the Philosophy of law and Public law at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.
Life and career
Reinhold Walter Zippelius was ...
uses Popper's method of "trial and error" in his 'Legal Philosophy'.
Themes
Although the CLS (like most schools and movements) has not produced a single, monolithic body of thought, several common themes can be generally traced in its adherents' works. These include:
* A first theme is that contrary to the common perception, legal materials (such as statute
A statute is a formal written enactment of a legislative authority that governs the legal entities of a city, state, or country by way of consent. Typically, statutes command or prohibit something, or declare policy. Statutes are rules made by le ...
s and case law
Case law, also used interchangeably with common law, is law that is based on precedents, that is the judicial decisions from previous cases, rather than law based on constitutions, statutes, or regulations. Case law uses the detailed facts of a l ...
) do not completely determine the outcome of legal disputes, or, to put it differently, the law may well impose many significant constraints on the adjudicators in the form of substantive rules, but, in the final analysis, this may often not be enough to bind them to come to a particular decision in a given particular case. Quite predictably, once made, this claim has triggered many lively debates among jurists and legal philosophers, some of which continue to this day (see further indeterminacy debate in legal theory
The indeterminacy debate in legal theory can be summed up as follows: Can the law constrain the results reached by adjudicators in legal disputes? Some members of the critical legal studies movement — primarily legal academics in the United Stat ...
).
* Secondly, there is the idea that all "law is politics". This means that legal decisions are a form of political decision, but not that it is impossible to tell judicial and legislative acts apart. Rather, CLS have argued that while the form may differ, both are based around the construction and maintenance of a form of social space. The argument takes aim at the positivist idea that law and politics can be entirely separated from one another. A more nuanced view has emerged more recently. This rejects the reductivism of 'all law is politics' and instead asserts that the two disciplines are mutually intertwined. There is no 'pure' law or politics, but rather the two forms work together and constantly shift between the two linguistic registers.
* A third strand of the traditional CLS school is that far more often than is usually suspected the law tends to serve the interests of the wealthy and the powerful by protecting them against the demands of the poor and the subaltern
Subaltern may refer to:
*Subaltern (postcolonialism), colonial populations who are outside the hierarchy of power
* Subaltern (military), a primarily British and Commonwealth military term for a junior officer
* Subalternation, going from a univer ...
(women, ethnic minorities, the working class, indigenous peoples, the disabled, homosexuals, etc.) for greater justice. This claim is often coupled with the legal realist argument that what the law says it does and what it actually tends to do are two different things. Many laws claim to have the aim of protecting the interests of the poor and the subaltern. In reality, they often serve the interests of the power elites. This, however, does not have to be the case, claim the CLS scholars. There is nothing intrinsic to the idea of law that should make it into a vehicle of social injustice. It is just that the scale of the reform that needs to be undertaken to realize this objective is significantly greater than the mainstream legal discourse is ready to acknowledge.
* Furthermore, CLS at times claims that legal materials are inherently contradictory, i.e. the structure of the positive legal order is based on a series of binary oppositions such as, for instance, the opposition between individualism and altruism or formal realizability (i.e. preference for strict rules) and equitable flexibility (i.e. preference for broad standards).
* Finally, CLS questions law's central assumptions, one of which is the Kantian
Kantianism is the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher born in Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). The term ''Kantianism'' or ''Kantian'' is sometimes also used to describe contemporary positions in philosophy of mind, ...
notion of the autonomous individual. The law often treats individual petitioners as having full agency vis-à-vis their opponents. They are able to make decisions based on reason that is detached from political, social, or economic constraints. CLS holds that individuals are tied to their communities, socio-economic class, gender, race, and other conditions of life such that they cease to be autonomous actors in the Kantian mode. Rather, their circumstances determine and therefore limit the choices presented to them. People are not "free"; they are instead determined in large part by social and political structures that surround them.
Increasingly, however, the traditional themes are being superseded by broader and more radical critical insights. Interventions in intellectual property law
Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, cop ...
, human rights
Human rights are Morality, moral principles or Social norm, normsJames Nickel, with assistance from Thomas Pogge, M.B.E. Smith, and Leif Wenar, 13 December 2013, Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyHuman Rights Retrieved 14 August 2014 for ce ...
, jurisprudence
Jurisprudence, or legal theory, is the theoretical study of the propriety of law. Scholars of jurisprudence seek to explain the nature of law in its most general form and they also seek to achieve a deeper understanding of legal reasoning a ...
, criminal law
Criminal law is the body of law that relates to crime. It prescribes conduct perceived as threatening, harmful, or otherwise endangering to the property, health, safety, and moral welfare of people inclusive of one's self. Most criminal law i ...
, property law
Property law is the area of law that governs the various forms of ownership in real property (land) and personal property. Property refers to legally protected claims to resources, such as land and personal property, including intellectual pro ...
, international law
International law (also known as public international law and the law of nations) is the set of rules, norms, and standards generally recognized as binding between states. It establishes normative guidelines and a common conceptual framework for ...
, etc., have proved crucial to the development of those discourses. Equally, CLS has introduced new frameworks to the legal field, such as postmodernism
Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or Rhetorical modes, mode of discourseNuyen, A.T., 1992. The Role of Rhetorical Devices in Postmodernist Discourse. Philosophy & Rhetoric, pp.183–194. characterized by philosophical skepticism, skepticis ...
, queer theory, literary approaches to law, psychoanalysis
PsychoanalysisFrom Greek: + . is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques"What is psychoanalysis? Of course, one is supposed to answer that it is many things — a theory, a research method, a therapy, a body of knowledge. In what might b ...
, law and aesthetics
Aesthetics, or esthetics, is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of beauty and taste, as well as the philosophy of art (its own area of philosophy that comes out of aesthetics). It examines aesthetic values, often expressed thr ...
, and post-colonialism
Postcolonialism is the Critical theory, critical academic study of the cultural, political and economic legacy of colonialism and imperialism, focusing on the impact of human control and exploitation of colonized people and their lands. More speci ...
.
Continued influence
Critical legal studies continues as a diverse collection of schools of thought and social movements. The CLS community is an extremely broad group with clusters of critical theorists at law schools and socio-legal studies departments such as Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School (Harvard Law or HLS) is the law school of Harvard University, a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1817, it is the oldest continuously operating law school in the United States.
Each class ...
, Georgetown University Law Center
The Georgetown University Law Center (Georgetown Law) is the law school of Georgetown University, a private research university in Washington, D.C. It was established in 1870 and is the largest law school in the United States by enrollment and ...
, Northeastern University
Northeastern University (NU) is a private university, private research university with its main campus in Boston. Established in 1898, the university offers undergraduate and graduate programs on its main campus as well as satellite campuses in ...
, University at Buffalo
The State University of New York at Buffalo, commonly called the University at Buffalo (UB) and sometimes called SUNY Buffalo, is a public research university with campuses in Buffalo and Amherst, New York. The university was founded in 1846 ...
, Chicago-Kent College of Law
Chicago-Kent College of Law is the law school affiliated with the Illinois Institute of Technology. It is the second oldest law school in the state of Illinois. It is ranked 91st among U.S. law schools, and its trial advocacy program is ranked in ...
, Birkbeck, University of London
, mottoeng = Advice comes over nightTranslation used by Birkbeck.
, established =
, type = Public research university
, endowment = £4.3 m (2014)
, budget = £10 ...
, University of Melbourne
The University of Melbourne is a public research university located in Melbourne, Australia. Founded in 1853, it is Australia's second oldest university and the oldest in Victoria. Its main campus is located in Parkville, an inner suburb nor ...
, University of Kent
, motto_lang =
, mottoeng = Literal translation: 'Whom to serve is to reign'(Book of Common Prayer translation: 'whose service is perfect freedom')Graham Martin, ''From Vision to Reality: the Making of the University of Kent at Canterbury'' ...
, Carleton University
Carleton University is an English-language public research university in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Founded in 1942 as Carleton College, the institution originally operated as a private, non-denominational evening college to serve returning World ...
, Keele University
Keele University, officially known as the University of Keele, is a public research university in Keele, approximately from Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, England. Founded in 1949 as the University College of North Staffordshire, Keele ...
, the University of Glasgow
, image = UofG Coat of Arms.png
, image_size = 150px
, caption = Coat of arms
Flag
, latin_name = Universitas Glasguensis
, motto = la, Via, Veritas, Vita
, ...
, the University of East London
, mottoeng = Knowledge and the fulfilment of vows
, established = 1898 – West Ham Technical Institute1952 – West Ham College of Technology1970 – North East London Polytechnic1989 – Polytechnic of East London ...
among others.
In the American legal academy its influence and prominence seems to have waned in recent years. However, offshoots of CLS, including critical race theory
Critical race theory (CRT) is a cross-disciplinary examination, by social and civil-rights scholars and activists, of how laws, social and political movements, and media shape, and are shaped by, social conceptions of race and ethnicity. Goa ...
continue to grow in popularity. Associated schools of thought, such as contemporary feminist theory
Feminist theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical, fictional, or philosophical discourse. It aims to understand the nature of gender inequality. It examines women's and men's social roles, experiences, interests, chores, and feminist ...
and ecofeminism
Ecofeminism is a branch of feminism and political ecology. Ecofeminist thinkers draw on the concept of gender to analyse the relationships between humans and the natural world. The term was coined by the French writer Françoise d'Eaubonne in h ...
and critical race theory now play a major role in contemporary legal scholarship. An impressive stream of CLS-style writings has also emerged in the last two decades in the areas of international and comparative law.
In addition, CLS has had a practical effect on legal education, as it was the inspiration and focus of Georgetown University Law Center's alternative first year curriculum, (Termed "Curriculum B", known as "Section 3" within the school). In the UK both Kent and Birkbeck have sought to draw critical legal insights into the legal curriculum, including a critical legal theory based LLM at Birkbeck's School of Law. Various research centers and institutions offer CLS-based taught and research courses in a variety of legal fields including human rights, jurisprudence, constitutional theory and criminal justice.
In New Zealand
New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island count ...
, the University of Otago
, image_name = University of Otago Registry Building2.jpg
, image_size =
, caption = University clock tower
, motto = la, Sapere aude
, mottoeng = Dare to be wise
, established = 1869; 152 years ago
, type = Public research collegiate u ...
Legal Issues Centre was established at the university's law faculty in 2007.
''Law and Critique
''Law and Critique'' (print: , online: ) is a triannual law journal closely involved with the critical legal studies community. It was established in 1990 and is associated with the Critical Legal Conference. ''Law and Critique'' takes a critical ...
'' is one of the few UK journals that specifically identifies itself with critical legal theory. In America, '' The Crit'' and '' Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left'' are the only journals that continue to explicitly position themselves as platforms for critical legal studies. However, other journals such as ''Law, Culture and the Humanities'', the ''Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review'', '' The National Lawyers Guild Review'', ''Social and Legal Studies'', and ''The Australian Feminist Law Journal
The ''Australian Feminist Law Journal'' is a biannual peer-reviewed academic journal covering feminist legal issues from a critical perspective. It was established in 1993 and is published by Routledge
Routledge () is a British multinational ...
'' all published avowedly critical legal research.
See also
* Critical management studies
Critical management studies (CMS) is a loose but extensive grouping of theoretically informed critiques of management, business and organisation, grounded originally in a critical theory perspective. Today it encompasses a wide range of perspective ...
* Critical race theory
Critical race theory (CRT) is a cross-disciplinary examination, by social and civil-rights scholars and activists, of how laws, social and political movements, and media shape, and are shaped by, social conceptions of race and ethnicity. Goa ...
* Critical theory
A critical theory is any approach to social philosophy that focuses on society and culture to reveal, critique and challenge power structures. With roots in sociology and literary criticism, it argues that social problems stem more from soci ...
* International legal theory
International legal theory comprises a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches used to explain and analyse the content, formation and effectiveness of public international law and institutions and to suggest improvements. Some approach ...
* Judicial activism
Judicial activism is a judicial philosophy holding that the courts can and should go beyond the applicable law to consider broader societal implications of its decisions. It is sometimes used as an antonym of judicial restraint. The term usually ...
* Law and literature
The law and literature movement focuses on connections between law and literature. This field has roots in two developments in the intellectual history of law—first, the growing doubt about whether law in isolation is a source of value and mean ...
References
Further reading
Further information on the title subject, presented in inverse order of date of publication, and alphabetical by author, within year:
* Eric Heinze
Eric Heinze is Professor of Law and Humanities at the School of Law Queen Mary, University of London. He has made contributions in the areas of legal philosophy, justice theory, jurisprudence, and human rights. He has also contributed to the law ...
, ''The Concept of Injustice'' Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013
* Costas Douzinas Costas Douzinas ( el, Κώστας Δουζίνας; born 1951) is a professor of law, a founder of the Birkbeck School of Law and the Department of Law of the University of Cyprus, the founding director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities ...
& Colin Perrin. Critical Legal Theory, 4 volumes, London: Routledge, 2011
* Eric Engle
Marxism, Liberalism, and Feminism: Leftist Legal Thought
New Delhi: Serials, 2010.
* Eric Engle
Lex Naturalis, Jus Naturalis: Law as Positive Reasoning and Natural Rationality
Melbourne: Elias Clark, 2010
* David W. Kennedy and William Fisher, eds. The Canon of American Legal Thought, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006
* Costas Douzinas Costas Douzinas ( el, Κώστας Δουζίνας; born 1951) is a professor of law, a founder of the Birkbeck School of Law and the Department of Law of the University of Cyprus, the founding director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities ...
& Adam Gearey, ''Critical Jurisprudence: The Political Philosophy of Justice'', Hart Publishing, 2005
* Duncan Kennedy, ''Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy: A Polemic Against the System: A Critical Edition'', New York, NY: New York University Press, 2004
* Le Roux and Van Marle, "Critical Legal Studies" in Roeder (ed), ''Jurisprudence'', 2004
* Janet E. Halley (ed.), Wendy Brown (ed.), ''Left Legalism/Left Critique-P'', Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2003
* Richard W. Bauman, ''Ideology and community in the first wave of critical legal studies'', Toronto, CA : University of Toronto Press, 2002
* Janet E. Halley "Revised version entitled "Like-Race Arguments"" in What's Left of Theory?, Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2001
* E. Dana Neacsu, CLS Stands for Critical Legal Studies, If Anyone Remembers, 8 J. L. & Pol'y, se
CLS Stands for Critical Legal Studies, If Anyone Remembers
2000
* Duncan Kennedy, A Critique of Adjudication in de siecle Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997
* Richard W. Bauman, ''Critical legal studies : a guide to the literature'', Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996
* Andrew Altman, ''Critical Legal Studies: A Liberal Critique'', Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1990
* J.M. Balkin, "Ideology as Constraint: Andrew Altman, 'Critical Legal Studies: A Liberal Critique' (1990)" ook review
Ook, OoK or OOK may refer to:
* Ook Chung (born 1963), Korean-Canadian writer from Quebec
* On-off keying, in radio technology
* Toksook Bay Airport (IATA code OOK), in Alaska
* Ook!, an esoteric programming language based on Brainfuck
* Ook, th ...
43 Stan. L. Rev. 1133, 1991
* David L. Gregory, "A Guide to Critical Legal Studies, by Mark Kelman, 1987" ook review
Ook, OoK or OOK may refer to:
* Ook Chung (born 1963), Korean-Canadian writer from Quebec
* On-off keying, in radio technology
* Toksook Bay Airport (IATA code OOK), in Alaska
* Ook!, an esoteric programming language based on Brainfuck
* Ook, th ...
Duke L.J. 1138, 1987
* Mark Kelman
Mark Kelman (born August 20, 1951) is jurist and vice dean of Stanford Law School. As a prominent legal scholar, he has applied social science methodologies, including economics and psychology, to the study of law. He is one of the most cited law ...
, ''A Guide to Critical Legal Studies'', Cambridge, MA: Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987
* Joan C. Williams, Critical Legal Studies: The Death of Transcendence and the Rise of the New Langdells, 62 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 429, 1987
* John Finnis
John Mitchell Finnis, , (born 28 July 1940) is an Australian legal philosopher, jurist and scholar specializing in jurisprudence and the philosophy of law. He is the Biolchini Family Professor of Law, emeritus, at Notre Dame Law School and a P ...
, "On the Critical Legal Studies Movement" 30 ''American Journal of Jurisprudence'', 1985
* Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Roberto Mangabeira Unger (; born 24 March 1947) is a Brazilian philosopher and politician. His work is in the tradition of classical social theory and pragmatism, and is developed across many fields including legal theory, philosophy and religion ...
, ''The Critical Legal Studies Movement'', Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983
* Pierre Schlag, "Critical Legal Studies,
Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History
External links
Legal Information Institute: Critical Legal Studies
Critical Legal Thinking
Law & Critique
Roberto Unger's writings on law and CLS
David W. Kennedy's writings on CLS and international law
Marxism, Feminism, and Liberalism: Leftist Legal Thought
(2010). Explores the liberal roots of Marxism and Marxist influences on the U.S. legal thought.
Lex Naturalis, Ius Naturalis: Law as Practical Reasoning and Natural Rationality
(2010). Exposé of contemporary critical legal theory.
Martti Koskenniemi's writings on CLS and international law
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Philosophy of law
Critical theory