*** Welcome to piglix ***

Critical legal studies


Critical legal studies are about theories that maintain that ideology (the stories we use to describe ourselves) is the principal component of human motivation. Its opponents claim that its conclusions are unreliable or unscientific because it relies on narrative rather than verifiable facts.

Critical legal studies is however closely associated with the philosophy of law which deals with the belief systems that connect formal law, social ethics and personal morality,

The abbreviations "CLS" and "Crit" are sometimes used to refer to the movement and its adherents.

Critical legal studies is movement in legal theory that attracted a network of leftist legal scholars and emerged as a movement in the 1970s in the United States.

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.


...
Wikipedia

...