The Critical Legal Studies Movement

Abstract

Critical Legal Studies (CLS) is a network of leftist legal scholars hostile to American political ideology and liberal political theory that traces its beginnings to the ‘Conference on Critical Legal Studies’ at the University of Wisconsin in 1977. 1 The movement has since seen many derivations. One of its main figures, legal scholar Duncan Kennedy, conceives CLS as both a network of leftist activists and as a branch of scholarly literature, arguing: ‘... critical 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.’ 2 Political and legal theorist Roberto Mangabeira Unger notes that while the movement ‘continued as an organizing force only until the late 1980s, ... its founders never meant it to become an ongoing school of thought or genre of writing.’ He delves further into the movement’s activist role in this book-length revision of his long, seminal 1983 article, ‘The Critical Legal Studies Movement.’ Interesting for Unger’s followers, this new edition is accompanied by an extended discussion on the potential of law and legal thought to inform the self-construction of society under our current democracy. Put differently, Unger proposes a shaping of society based on a vision of human personality devoid of the hidden interests and class domination, which, for the CLS movement, are the pillars sustaining liberal legal institutions in the West.

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