Scholars in the "Critical Legal Studies" movement have challenged some of the most cherished ideals of modern Western legal and political thought. CLS thinkers claim that the rule of law is a myth and that its defense by liberal thinkers is riddled with inconsistencies. This first book-length liberal reply to CLS systematically examines the philosophical underpinnings of the CLS movement and exposes the deficiencies in the major lines of CLS argument against liberalism.

The civil rights and feminist movements of the sixties did not leave legal theory untouched. Over the following two decades, the critical legal studies movement--led by the Brazilian philosopher, social theorist and politician Roberto Unger--sought to transform traditional views of law and legal doctrine, revealing the hidden interests and class dominations in prevailing legal frameworks. It remains highly influential, having spawned more recent movements, including feminist legal studies and critical race theory. (...) The Critical Legal Studies Movement develops its major ideas, showing how laws and legal discourse hide the social inequalities and political biases that so interest philosophy and revolutionary politics. (shrink)

Critical legal studies is one of the most challenging developments in the contemporary study of law. Drawing heavily on the radical political culture of the period since the 1960s, critical legal studies assents the necessity of a politics of law - a politics which sees law, not as something apart, but as engaged in the multitude of arguments, battles and struggles which produce the human condition. Such a committment decisively rejects the dominant tradition of (...) Anglo-American legal scholarship, the expository orthodoxy or, more crudely, the 'black-letter law' approach. The essays in this book provide the first wide ranging exploration of the aims and scope of critical legal studies in Britain. They draw on a diversity of intellectual traditions, including feminism, Marxism, critical theory and deconstruction and explore the implications of the critical approach for important areas such as property, contract, company, and labour law. (shrink)

Critical Legal Studies poses a direct and expressed challenge to the basic tenets of American legal education and scholarship. Critical Legal Studies postulates that law is not a scientific exercise involving the application of objective principles, but rather a creative process involving the selection of conflicting rules which has the effect of reinforcing the existing political order. In an effort to explain the contribution of Critical Legal Studies to argumentation theory, (...) this essay briefly discusses the role of legal reasoning in the American legal system, describes and critiques Legal Positivism, lays the intellectual foundation for Critical Legal Studies, and considers the implications that this conception of jurisprudence has for argumentation theory. (shrink)

The critical legal studies movement involves a group of scholars who have political views ranging from disaffected liberalism to committed marxism to utopian anarchism. This movement in the field of jurisprudence has arisen aver the past ten years and hopes to influence a radical change in what they view as liberal orthodox legal theory. Topics of discussion include the intellectual foundations of the CLS movement, its principles and aims, its critique of the legal doctrine and (...) ideas for change. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Critical Legal Studies as Analytic Jurisprudence: The Critique of Liberal Rights Theory Critical Legal Studies as Social Theory Conclusion References.

This volume surveys the current state of the critical Legal Studies movement- a fifteen year old initiative whose proponents are committed to building a strong progrsseve community inside law schools and the legal profession. In his introduciton, Boyle argues that CLS has succeeded because it analyzes the inadequacies of rights talk, technocracy, and law and economics, and because it connects theory with the everyday experiences of lawyers and legal scholars. Articles present the CLS perspective on (...) legal reasoning, legal hisory, substantive law, legal practice, and social theory. (shrink)

This book outlines and evaluates the principal strands of critical legal studies, and achieves much more as well.

This brief essay describes what critical legal scholars said – or perhaps more accurately – would have said – about the concept of the rule of law. Describing critical legal studies as a project in American legal thought rather than analytical jurisprudence, it argues that “the rule of law” is an ideological project, and can come in various versions – liberal, social democratic, and more. It addresses Morton Horwitz’s critique of E.P. Thompson’s assertion that (...) the rule of law is an unqualified human good, and situates the CLS critique of the rule of law within more general discussion of the rule of law by Hayek and Fuller. It concludes by applying ideology-critique to the rule of law, arguing that in whatever form it takes the rule of law contributes to a culture of justification, which may indeed be an unqualified human good. (shrink)

Liberal egalitarian jurisprudence and critical legal studies have often been at odds, despite sharing a core of set of political and analytical commitments. This paper makes the case for their conciliation in the 21st century on the basis that both traditions have much to offer one another. Liberal egalitarians offer the theoretical tools for developing an egalitarian normative approach to law, and critical legal theorists offer a vital realism about power.

In this first book-length liberal reply to CLS, Andrew Altman systematically examines the philosophical underpinnings of the CLS movement and exposes the deficiencies in the major lines of the CLS argument against liberalism.

Cet ouvrage donne une place importante à l'idée de la justice selon deux philosophes : selon la théorie de Thomas Hobbes elle est prise dans un cercle entre la loi, le souverain et la violence, tandis que pour Jacques Derrida, elle ne doit pas être limitée à la loi. L'intention de l'auteure, n'est pas d'apporter une nouvelle théorie, mais de montrer qu'une idée philosophique peut avoir une influence en politique ou en droit selon les propositions des Critical Legal (...) Studies. (shrink)

Les Critical Legal Studies et ses divers tributaires ont fortement marqué la conscience juridique contemporaine. Ces notions ne sont plus simplement le domaine d’un collectif de juristes nord-américains, mais font désormais partie du discours académique transnational et influencent la formation de divers projets et demandes politiques, malgré leur impact négligeable sur la pratique juridique traditionnelle. Les mouvements de type féministe, racial, LGBTQ+ et postcolonialiste ont profité largement de l’énergie intellectuelle et de l’engagement inhérent à ses analyses critiques. (...) En outre, ces façons d’envisager le droit et de faire de la politique trouvent leur écho en plusieurs juridictions. Des manifestations parallèles, allant au-delà des États-Unis, mettent en évidence la portée de ces idées. Cet article a pour but de décrire, de façon succincte, l’évolution du CLS allant d’une série de critiques précises sur le droit états-unien jusqu’à des discours généralisés, répandus dans divers circuits transnationaux de pensée et d’action. (shrink)

One of the most fascinating but also one of the most criticised legal theories in the USA for the last years have been the Critical Legal Studies which emerged some thirty years ago and queried the hegemonic views on the law and the law system in the US. This essay especially tries to analyse the position of one of the leading representatives of this so called “movement” - Duncan Kennedy - towards the role of judges in (...) the US-American legal system. As the American legislation and adjudication have intensified their ambitions to extend their power of jurisdiction - all thus going hand in hand with a restriction of the human rights - a view on a critical and progressive US-American theory of jurisdiction is of great importance. (shrink)

Critical theory encapsulates the many connections between theory and praxis. This Research Handbook addresses the broad range of these connections in relation to legal thought. Featuring contributions from leading scholars of law and critical theory, the Handbook confronts the logic of the institutional with its specific challenges right across the broad field of legal thought. The Research Handbook initially addresses the question of definition, tracking the origins and development of critical legal theory along its (...) European and North American trajectories. Thematic connections are made between the development of legal theory and other currents of critical thought including feminism, Marxism, critical race theory, varieties of postmodernism, as well as the various 'turns' (ethical, aesthetic, political) of critical legal theory. Finally, particular legal disciplines are examined, including labour, criminal and intellectual property law, exploring what critical approaches reveal about them with the clear focus on opportunities for social transformation. This comprehensive and forward-looking Research Handbook will be of great interest to adherents of critical legal theory and scholars of jurisprudence more widely, as it provides a valuable analysis of the latest research and thinking in this dynamic field. (shrink)

Critical Legal Theory and the Challenge of Feminism provides both a thorough overview and a refinement of the ideas that underlie critical legal theory. Arguing with the rigor of analytic philosophy and the alertness to paradoxes characteristic of deconstructive philosophy, Matthew Kramer begins by exploring the tangled relations between metaphysics and politics. He then attempts to transform the discourses of the critical legal studies movement by laying out a framework of five general themes: (...) contradictions, contingency, patterning, perspective, and ideology. Kramer calls for a more sophisticated awareness of their paradoxes, explaining why the paradoxes are by no means disabling or demobilizing. Finally, Kramer explores some of feminist theory's major controversies and problems, and argues that feminist theory can profit greatly by giving due attention to inescapable paradoxes. The book is an important contribution to political philosophy, jurisprudence, feminist philosophy and metaphysics, with powerful implications for epistemology and literary theory. (shrink)

The article analyses the impact of the neoliberal policy framework and managerialism on critical legal education in the context of Waikato Law Faculty, University of Waikato, Aotearoa New Zealand. The delivery of critical legal education challenges the ideology and implementation of current tertiary education policy and training because it is designed to deliver critical knowledge and not just vocational information. Waikato Law School was established in 1990 the year the neoliberal tertiary policy was enacted in (...) the Education Amendment Act 1990. It represented an attempt to introduce a more critical and inclusive approach to legal education. The article provides an account of the struggle to maintain a critical approach under a statutory framework that requires conformity to government policy designed to cut the cost of tertiary education and integrate universities into a neoliberal policy framework. The case study is intended to illustrate the insidious influence of the policy on undermining a legal education that prepares students to think critically. It is also intended to illustrate that it is possible to resist this interference in the fundamental role of the academic to be the critic and conscience of society. (shrink)

New Critical Legal Thinking articulates the emergence of a stream of critical legal theory which is directly concerned with the relation between law and the political. The early critical legal studies claim that all law is politics is displaced with a different and more nuanced theoretical arsenal. Combining grand theory with a concern for grounded political interventions, the various contributors to this book draw on political theorists and continental philosophers in order to engage (...) with current legal problematics, such as the recent global economic crisis, the Arab spring and the emergence of biopolitics. The contributions instantiate the claim that a new and radical political legal scholarship has come into being: one which critically interrogates and intervenes in the contemporary relationship between law and power. (shrink)

Critical Legal Theory has conventionally been traced to the social, political, and philosophical movements of the 1960s and, before that, to the early-twentieth-century ‘realist’ critique of modern jurisprudence. In truth, however, its origins go back to classical and pre-modern thought, and to their acknowledgement of the centrality of law in attempts to conceive of the good life, or the just polity—a centrality that is, moreover, also discernible in the recent gravitation of a number of contemporary philosophers and theorists (...) towards law. Against the ‘restricted’ and ‘conservative’ character of modern jurisprudence, Critical Legal Theory constitutes a return to this more general interest in law and legality. Exceeding the limits of jurisprudence, it has, moreover, drawn upon the most ancient and most contemporary traditions of critical thought in order to pursue new ways of understanding, living, and imagining the law. Critical Legal Theory is now an established—if heterogeneous and controversial—field of study, represented by numerous international journals, regional organizations, and global conferences. As the field continues to flourish as never before, this new title in Routledge’s Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Law, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of literature. Indeed, it is a landmark collection of Critical Legal Theory’s principal sources, orientations, movements, and themes. The first volume in the collection illuminates the foundations of Critical Legal Theory in contemporary continental thought, as well as providing an account of its institutional history. Volume II, meanwhile, examines the ways in which Critical Legal Theory has addressed and problematized conventional jurisprudential ideas about law, drawing upon the insights of philosophy, as well as other disciplines. Volume III assembles the best and most influential research to provide an overview of the movements that characterize the field. The scholarship assembled in the final volume brings together the key work to explore a range of substantial themes with which Critical Legal Theorists have engaged. Supplemented with a full index and comprehensive introductions, newly written by the editors, which situate the collected material in the context of more general theoretical traditions, as well as in critical relation to jurisprudence, _Critical Legal Theory_ is destined to be valued by scholars, students, and researchers as a vital resource. (shrink)

Based on interviews with legal practitioners working with or within anti-racist social justice movements in Sweden, we explore some dilemmas and paradoxes that appear when social movements pursue struggles for anti-racist social justice through the legal arena. How do the interviewees understand and critically relate to legal practices in contemporary anti-racist social justice struggles? What are the conditions of engagement of these organisations in the legal arena and how do they impact social justice struggles in Sweden? (...) What are the stakes in the legal practices of these movements? Rather than a strategically chosen tool for social justice, legal practice could be understood as a kind of self-defence, as resorting to law is often a response to an unjust legal system, oppressive treatment by the state or disadvantage and deprivation. The interviewees’ reflections on their legal practices are informed by a fundamental ambivalence between the ideological commitment in the critique of law and their position from which it is impossible to ignore the legal arena. Instead of taking a clear stance for or against the law as a tool for social justice struggles, we have attempted to understand what are the methods and the effects of legal practice that grow from this ambivalence. The accounts of our interviewees indicate that both practical strategies and ways of accounting for these aim at subverting and challenging the law while at the same time using it. Throughout the analysis we have conceptualised these strategies as decentring, re-politicising and redistribution. (shrink)

The present reflection draws upon a tradition of energetic, world-facing critical legal scholarship to interrogate the anthropos assumed by the terminology of ‘anthropocentrism’ and of the ‘Anthropocene’. The article concludes that any ethically responsible future engagement with ‘anthropocentrism’ and/or with the ‘Anthropocene’ must explicitly engage with the oppressive hierarchical structure of the anthropos itself—and should directly address its apotheosis in the corporate juridical subject that dominates the entire globalised order of the Anthropocene age.

The studies of politics and law are closely related in that both deal with the use of coercive power in society, yet the two disciplines are often curiously isolated from each other. Political theorists are rarely concerned with the specific content and application of the legislation which they regard as one of the main outputs of a political system, while legal academics are, traditionally at least, noted for their general indifference to the political and economic context of the (...) rules and they seek to explain and systemize. (shrink)

Introduction to Critical Legal Theory provides an accessible introduction to the study of law and legal theory. It covers all the seminal movements in classical, modern and postmodern legal thought, engaging the reader with the ideas of jurists as diverse as Aristotle, Hobbes and Kant, Marx, Foucault and Dworkin. At the same time, it impresses the interdisciplinary nature of critical legal thought, introducing the reader to the philosophy, the economics and the politics of law. (...) This new edition focuses even more intently upon the narrative aspect of critical legal thinking and the re-emergence of a distinctive legal humanism, as well as the various related challenges posed by our 'new' world order. Introduction to Critical Theory is a comprehensive text for both students and teachers of legal theory, jurisprudence and related subjects. (shrink)

Application of Lacan's theory to some concrete legal problems follows in the second part of the book with a series of studies including child abuse hysteria, land use debates, the critique of legal ideology; and religion in law and politics.

In the past ten years, work by K€olbel, MacFarlane, Richard and others has rekindled old debates on relativism. In this important contribution to those debates, the authors defend a ‘mainstream’ view about the contents of thought and talk that they call Simplicity against the assaults from such ‘analytic relativists’.