This is part of the Culture War Encyclopedia.
Definitions
Critical legal studies, or CLS, is a school of critical theory which
applied poststructuralist and Marxist strategies to critique legal institutions, questioning the extent to which one can separate law and politics while illustrating the ways that the legal system is designed to support the dominant class at the expense of marginalized, subaltern groups
according to Critical Theory - the Key Concepts1 by Dino Franco Felluga.2
Critical legal studies is capitalized in some soures but not in others.
In the glossary of Critical Race Theory - An Introduction by Delgado and Stefancic3, we see
CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES: Legal movement that challenged liberalism from the Left, denying that law is neutral, that every case has a single correct answer, and that rights are of vital importance.
History
According to Critical Theory - the Key Concepts4, critical legal studies
was an active school of critical theory in the 1970s and 1980s,
that has been “largely eclipsed” by critical race theory (CRT) which
has become the dominant way of approaching such legal questions.
Critical legal studies gave a painful birth to critical race theory in the 1980s according to the editors of Critical Race Theory - the Key Writings That Formed the Movement.5
However, according to critical race scholars Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic in Critical Race Theory - an Introduction,6
critical race theory sprang up in the 1970s as a number of lawyers, activists, and legal scholars across the country realized, more or less simultaneously, that the heady advanced of the civil rights era of the 1960s had stalled and, in many respects, were being rolled back.
Both of these sources agree that the late 1980s marked a pronounced split between the proponents of CLS (who were white) and those of CRT (who were people of color (POC)).7
In Critical Race Theory - the Key Writings That Formed the Movement the editors write about the origins of CLS that8
a predominantly white left emerged on the law school scene in the late seventies, a development which played a central role in the genesis of Critical Race Theory. Organized by a collection of neo-Marxist intellectuals, former New Left activists, ex-counter-culturalists, and other varieties of oppositionists in law schools, the Conference on Legal Studies established itself as a network of openly leftist law teachers, students, and practitioners committed to exposing and challenged the ways American law served to legitimize an oppressive social order. Like the later experience of Critical Race writers vis-a-vis race scholarship, “crits” found themselves frustrated with the presuppositions of the conventional scholarly legal discourse: they opposed not only conservative legal work but also the dominant liberal varieties. Crits contended that liberal and conservative legal scholarship operated in the narrow ideological channel within which law was understood as qualitatively different from politics. The faith of liberal lawyers in the gradual reform of American law through the victory of superior rationality of progressive ideas depended on a belief in the central ideological myth of the law/politics distinction, namely, that legal institutions employ a rational, apolitical, and neutral discourse with which to mediate the exercise of social power. This, in essence, is the role of law as understood by liberal political theory. Yet politics was embedded in the very doctrinal categories with which law organized and represented social reality.
Much of the introduction of Critical Race Theory - the Key Writings That Formed the Movement deals with the history of CLS and its relationship with CRT who were “often allied”9 but which could also be tense and racialized10 as it were.
Also see…
communism
intersectionalism
neo-marxism
poststructuralism
progressivism
socialism
wokeism
last update 2024-02-18
This is part of the Culture War Encyclopedia.
Critical theory - the Key Concepts by Dino Franco Felluga (Routledge, 2015), page 61
Dino Franco Felluga, whose specialties include Critical Theory, is a professor at the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University. See here. He has a 3.4 out of 5 rating at Rate My Professor.
Critical Race Theory - An Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (3rd edition, New York University Press, 2017), page 171
Page 61
Critical Race Theory - the Key Writings That Formed the Movement, forward by Cornel West, edited by Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, Kendel Thomas (the New Press, 1995), pages xvi-xvii.
Critical Race Theory - An Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (3rd edition, New York university Press, 2017), page 4.
See the introduction of Critical Race Theory - the Key Writings That Formed the Movement beginning at page xvi.
Pages xvii-xviii in Critical Race Theory - the Key Writings That Formed the Movement.
Page xiii
See page xvi to the end of the introduction.