Critical legal studies

Critical legal studies (CLS) is a school of critical theory that first emerged as a movement in the United States during the 1970s. Critical Legal Studies adherents claim that laws are used to maintain the status quo of society's power structures; it is also held that the law is a codified form of society's 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:ritical 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. Critical legal studies (CLS) is a school of critical theory that first emerged as a movement in the United States during the 1970s. Critical Legal Studies adherents claim that laws are used to maintain the status quo of society's power structures; it is also held that the law is a codified form of society's 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: Considered 'the first movement in legal theory and legal scholarship in the United States 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. 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.' During its period of peak influence, the critical legal studies movement caused considerable controversy within the legal academy. Members such as Roberto Mangabeira Unger 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. The abbreviations 'CLS' and 'Crit' are sometimes used to refer to the movement and its adherents. Although the intellectual origins of the critical legal studies (CLS) can be generally traced to American legal realism, 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 and those who worked on Deconstruction, between those who look to explicitly political engagements and those who work in aesthetics and ethics. 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.' 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 organizing force only until the late 1980s. Its life as a movement lasted for barely more than a decade.' 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.' Kennedy has emphasized the twofold nature of critical legal studies, as both a network of leftist scholar/activists and a scholarly literature: