Abstract

Not so very long ago — that is to say during the late sixties and early seventies — most Left lawyers understood the law as an ideological and repressive force imposed upon oppressed individuals, groups and classes from without. Viewed from the eye of the political storm surrounding the antiwar and Black liberation struggles, the conclusion that the law was a prime instrument of ruling class hegemony seemed obvious. Before the bar of progressive opinion, radicals presented their indictment of the entire juridical apparatus of the American state sub nomine the law against the people. The law was dismissed contemptuously as an elaborate structure of myths, the function of which was to obscure the underlying reality of bitter struggle between social classes.