Critical Legal Studies

Introduction

A critical legal study (CLS) is a theory that challenges and overturns accepted norms and standards in legal theory and practice.

The critical legal studies movement is the name given to a group of scholars who wrote about legal theory using ideas associated with Left politics and who tried to use law, legal education, or writing about the law to affect Left results.

Meaning of Legal Theory

Legal theory focuses on the work of society’s coercive normative institutions. It studies the traditions of these institutions and the craft typifying their members while at the same time continuously challenging their outputs by demonstrating their contingency and testing their desirability. In performing the latter tasks, legal theory necessarily

Both movements are antiformalist and sceptical; both seek to demystify the law: to reveal the law ‘in action’. But in at least four important respects CLS differs from realism. First, it is largely uninterested in the pragmatic or empirical concerns (what courts, lawyers, legislators actually ‘do’) that preoccupied the realists. For CLS the law is regarded as ‘problematic’ in the sense that it reproduces the oppressive character of society. Secondly, unlike the American realists who accepted the distinction between legal reasoning and politics, CLS views it as axiomatic that law is politics: there is nothing special about legal reasoning to distinguish it from other forms of reasoning. Thirdly, CLS exhibits a much deeper concern with theory than was ever the case with the realists. There is a fairly strong tie with the critical theory of the so-called Frankfurt School and its leading contemporary figure, Jurgen Habermas, as well as writers like Foucault, Unger, etc. Fourthly, though the realists were determined to differentiate between legal rules and their actual operation in society, they generally embraced the neutrality of law and the ideology of liberalism. CLS, of course, rejects

That history holds that CLS carries forward the intellectual program of the Legal Realists of the 1930s. For present purposes, the Realist project can be described as having two elements. The Realists insisted that statements of abstract legal doctrine had no real or cognitive content, and so could not solve any concrete cases or problems. In addition, they insisted that the only sensible way to resolve legal questions was to pay attention to, and choose among, the policies that were implicated in the