For more information on critical law studies, check out this article in the University of Minnesota Journal of Theory and Practice, this Harvard Law Review article, and this article on the University of Pennsylvania Faculty Scholarship. CLS was officially founded in 1977 at the conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but its roots go back to earlier when many of its founding members participated in social activism around the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. The founders of CLS borrowed from non-legal fields such as social theory, political philosophy, economics, and literary theory. Well-known CLS theorists include Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Robert W. Gordon, and Duncan Kennedy. Scholars associated with critical legal studies often identified with the movement in a variety of ways: by including in their articles an introductory footnote mentioning the Conference on Critical Legal Studies, and by providing contact information for the organization by attending CCLS conferences and citing the work of other critical jurists. A bibliography of CLS work compiled in 1984 by Duncan Kennedy and Karl Klare and published in the Yale Law Journal included dozens of authors and hundreds of books. [5] In France, where the legal tradition was closely guarded by law faculties and supervised by Napoleonic institutions such as the Court of Cassation, the Council of State and the Ecole Nationale de la Magistrature, the famous sociologist Pierre Bourdieu caused an uproar by publishing in 1986 his book « La Force De La Loi, Elements Pour Une Sociologie du Champ Juridique » – translated as « The Power of Law » [ 5]. Towards a Sociology of the Juridical Field », in the Hastings Law Journal (1987).
He announced the beginning of critical continental legal studies. Roberto Unger, a key member of critical jurisprudence whose influence continued to be far-reaching in the decades following the movement`s decline, wrote that the founders of critical jurisprudence « never intended it to become a school of continuous thought or a genre of writing. They wanted to intervene in certain circumstances. [13] [Fundamental legal studies have two aspects. It is a scientific literature and it was also a network of people who considered themselves activists in the politics of the law school. Initially, the scientific literature was produced by the same people who practiced Jura activism. Critical jurisprudence is not a theory. It is essentially this literature that is produced by this network of people.
I think you can identify some topics in the literature, topics that have changed over time. [14] This circumstance was the predominant practice of legal analysis, which Unger calls the « method of reasoned elaboration. » [16] A close descendant of nineteenth-century doctrinal formalism, which, through legal analysis, sought to « establish the integrated legal content of one. Free society »,[17] The method of reasoned elaboration treated legal documents as an « ideal element », an inherent legal substance underlying the contradictions and ambiguities of the legal text. [18] According to the practice of reasoned elaboration, this inherent legal substance forms a prescriptive system that judges gradually discover through reasoning through politics and principles of law, without calling into question the « basic institutional arrangements of the market economy, democratic politics and civil society outside the market and the state. » [19] In addition, the CLS has had a practical impact on legal education, as it has inspired and targeted Georgetown University Law Center`s alternative first-year curriculum (« Curriculum B, » known as « Section 3 » within the school). In the UK, Kent and Birkbeck sought to gain critical legal knowledge in the legal studies curriculum, including an LLM based on critical legal theory at Birkbeck Law School. Various research centers and institutions offer CLS-based teaching and research courses in a variety of areas of law, including human rights, jurisprudence, constitutional theory, and criminal justice. In addition to the context of the interpretation of the law, critical legal studies also emerged in response to their political context, namely an environment in which the social democratic regulation concluded after the Second World War had become canonical[21], and the active dispute over the organization of society declined sharply and effectively anchored a dominant consensus on social organization, which Unger described as a « combination of neoliberal orthodoxy, state capitalism and compensatory redistribution through taxes and transfers. » [22] Critical jurists have questioned this consensus and attempted to use legal theory as a means of exploring other forms of social and political organization. The critical jurisprudence movement emerged in the mid-1970s as a network of left-wing law professors in the United States who developed the thesis of realistic uncertainty in the service of left-wing ideals. According to Roberto Unger, the movement « only existed until the late 1980s as an organizing force. Their life as a movement lasted just over a decade. [13] CLS includes several subgroups with fundamentally different, even contradictory, views.
Feminist legal theory examines the role of gender in law. Critical Racial Theory (CRT) examines the role of race in law. Postmodernism is a critique of law influenced by developments in literary theory, and it emphasizes the political economy and economic context of legal decisions and issues. Although CLS was widely included in the United States, it was greatly influenced by European philosophers such as Karl Marx, Max Weber, Max Horkheimer, Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault. CLS was strongly oriented towards legal realism, the school of legal thought that flourished in the 1920s and 1930s. Like CLS researchers, legal realists rebelled against the legal theories accepted at the time and called on the legal field to pay more attention to the social context of law. Critical Legal Studies (CLS) is a school of critical theory that developed in the United States in the 1970s. [1] CLS supporters argue that the laws were designed to maintain society`s status quo, codifying its prejudices against marginalized groups. [2] Despite the great differences in opinion of critical jurists around the world, there is a general consensus[3] on the main objectives of critical legal studies: critical legal studies have their intellectual origin in the American movement of legal realism in the 1930s. Prior to the 1930s, American jurisprudence had been dominated by a formalistic account of court decisions, a narrative that stated that judges decided cases on the basis of clear legal rules and reasons that justified a single outcome. Legal realists have argued that the law and jurisprudence are vague and that courts of appeal decide cases not on the basis of the law, but on the basis of what they consider to be fair in light of the facts of a case.
American legal realism, considered « the most important jurisprudential movement of the 20th century »[12], caused a shock in American jurisprudence by undermining formalistic principles that had long been considered the foundation of jurisprudence. [Citation needed] Although the intellectual origins of Critical Legal Studies (CLS) generally date back to American legal realism, it wasn`t until the late 1970s that clS fully emerged as a distinct scientific movement. Many American researchers of the first wave of CLS entered legal education after being greatly influenced by the experiences of the civil rights movement, the women`s rights movement, and the anti-war movement of the 1960s and 1970s. What began as a critical attitude toward American domestic politics eventually led to a critical attitude toward the dominant legal ideology of modern Western society. The « critics, » drawing on both national theory and the work of European social theorists, sought to debunk what they saw as the many myths at the heart of mainstream legal thought and current legal practice. The influence of legal realism has shaken 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 was a series of unsuccessful attempts to find from the shock of realism a basis for a legal theory that articulates a picture of the objectivity of the legal process, although the explanation offered by post-realism must have been more complex than that, which provided a doctrine of compliance with the rules. » [1] The British movement for critical legal studies began around a similar time to its American counterpart. However, he focused on a number of conferences held each year, including the Critical Legal Conference and the National Critical Lawyers Group. There are still a number of fault lines in the Community; between theory and practice, between those who look at Marxism and those who have worked on deconstruction, between those who explicitly seek political commitment and those who work in aesthetics and ethics. CLS continues to be a diverse collection of schools of thought and social movements.
The CLS community is an extremely broad group with groups of critical theorists in law schools and departments of social law studies such as Harvard Law School, Georgetown University Law Center, Northeastern University, University at Buffalo, Chicago-Kent College of Law, Birkbeck, University of London, University of Melbourne, University of Kent, Carleton University, Keele University, the University of Glasgow, including the University of East London.