The Critical Legal Studies Movement (book)
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| Author | Roberto Mangabeira Unger |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Philosophy |
| Publisher | 1986 (Harvard University Press); 2015 (Verso Books) |
| Pages | 224 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 6940387 |
| LC Class | K230.U56C755 2015 |
| Preceded by | Passion: An Essay on Personality |
| Followed by | Politics: A Work In Constructive Social Theory |
The Critical Legal Studies Movement is a book by philosopher and politician Roberto Mangabeira Unger. First published in 1983 as an article in the Harvard Law Review, published in book form in 1986, and reissued with a new introduction in 2015, The Critical Legal Studies Movement is a principal document of the American critical legal studies movement that supplied the book with its title. In the book, Unger argues that law and legal thought offers unrealized possibilities for the self-construction of a more democratic society, and that many lawyers and legal theorists have uncritically surrendered to constraints that undermine their ability to make use of law’s transformative potential. Unger explains how the critical legal studies movement has refined and reformulated the major themes of leftist and progressive legal theorists, namely the critique of formalism and objectivism in legal doctrine, and the purely instrumental use of legal practice and doctrine to advance leftist aims, and in doing so, has identified elements of a constructive program for the reconstruction of society.
Unger sets out to show how contemporary theories of law and society have been constrained by the false belief that law is a necessary expression of certain abstract ideas of social organization, such as democracy or market economy. Unger contends that these modes of social organization do not have any natural, necessary, or inevitable form. Unger begins The Critical Legal Studies Movement by critiquing formalism and objectivism, the ideas that he believes lie at the root of the necessitarian thinking that blinds us to law's transformative and constructive potential and possibilities. Formalism is the belief that lawmaking differs fundamentally from law application. Objectivism is the belief that authoritative legal materials (statues, cases, accepted legal ideas) embody and sustain a defensible scheme of human association and display an intelligible moral order.
Unger suggests that applying "extreme criticism" to formalist and objectivist ideas will expose the elements of a constructive program for the reconstruction of society in line with leftist aims. In this chapter he sets forth critiques of objectivism and formalism. His critique of objectivism aims to show that there is no built-in legal structure for a social organization, and that democracy and the market do not have a universal legal language. His attack on formalism shows that existing legal theories claim to achieve "sanctification of the actual"—that is, these theories claim that substantive law and doctrine just happens to coincide with a coherent normative theory about human conduct. Unger explains that such legal analysis is, in reality, pieced together by an endless process of ad hoc adjustments.
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