Critical Legal Studies

by observing the vast growth of state intervention in the post-war years, many law teachers
became aware of the increasing gap between law in the books and in reality, and began to see
teaching law in isolation from its social, political and economic context as an heroic folly.” “A
radical approach to jurisprudence that developed in the USA in the 1970s. It expresses a broadly
Marxist critique of the substantive doctrines of the law (see Marxist legal theory), but draws
on philosophy, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and semiotics as well as politics
and economics. In its early stages, CLS was distinctive in two respects: first, it was located
within legal scholarship rather than sociology or political science; secondly, it sought to address
the inequities of legal doctrine. Although often described as a successor of legal realism, its
view of the notion of the indeterminacy of law is in fact much more radical. Whereas the US
realists regarded indeterminacy as being confined to a certain class of cases, CLS theorists
contend that law is radically indeterminate in the sense that the class of available legal materials
rarely, if ever, logically or causally entails a unique outcome. It rejects conventional liberal
conceptions of law that draw a fundamental distinction between law-making by the legislature,
on the one hand, and interpretation of the law by the judiciary, on the other. Since CLS regards
the law as indeterminate, judges are perceived as typically deciding cases by making new law,
a view inconsistent with liberal ideology.”
Marxism and Law - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1aHjY4uPgY
Poststructuralist Critiques -
- Michel Foucault - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGQ4qkp4i-8 - Discipline and
Punish discussion starts at 11.22. Beware of short description of torture a few minutes
later!
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5wuB_p63YM - Foucault and Chomsky on
Justice and human nature (1971) – although both continue to be read.