For more information on critical law studies, check out this article in the University of Minnesota Journal of Theory and Practice, this Harvard Law Review article, and this article on the University of Pennsylvania Faculty Scholarship. Catharine A. MacKinnon is a leading figure in radical feminist criticism (sometimes called Fem-Crit). Throughout his career, MacKinnon has sought to show how the established legal system reflects the sexism of the society he created. The law, according to MacKinnon, is just an extension of a male-dominated society characterized by gender inequality and women`s sexual objectification. As a product of a male-centered worldview and a male-dominated state, the law systematically harasses and discriminates against women. « The law, » MacKinnon writes, « sees and treats women in the same way that men see and treat women. It ensures male control over female sexuality. The feminist project to counter this negative aspect of the legal tradition, MacKinnon wrote, is to « discover and claim as valid the experience of women whose main content is the defvalidation of women`s experience. » CLS was officially founded in 1977 at the conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but its roots go back to earlier when many of its founding members participated in social activism around the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. The founders of CLS borrowed from non-legal fields such as social theory, political philosophy, economics, and literary theory. Well-known CLS theorists include Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Robert W.

Gordon, and Duncan Kennedy. CLS has many criticisms. Some see in it a lack of coherence, heavy with the very contradictions that he identifies in liberalism. Others accuse the movement of being nihilistic, of destroying the foundations of legal reasoning without putting anything in its place or even making positive recommendations for change. You find CLS recipes for the future too vague and utopian for practical application. Another common complaint is that the writings of CLS researchers are unnecessarily obscure, opaque and sensual. Critical legal studies have their intellectual origins in the American legal realism movement in the 1930s. Prior to the 1930s, American jurisprudence had been dominated by a formalistic account of court decisions, a narrative that stated that judges decided cases on the basis of clear legal rules and reasons that justified a single outcome. Legal realists have argued that the law and jurisprudence are vague and that courts of appeal decide cases not on the basis of the law, but on the basis of what they consider to be fair in light of the facts of a case. American legal realism, considered « the most important jurisprudential movement of the 20th century »[12], caused a shock in American jurisprudence by undermining formalistic principles that had long been considered the foundation of jurisprudence. [Citation needed] At the American Law Academy, its influence and importance seem to have diminished in recent years. However, the ramifications of CLS, including critical race theory, are becoming increasingly popular.

Associated schools of thought such as contemporary feminist theory and ecofeminism and critical racial theory play an important role in contemporary jurisprudence today. An impressive stream of CLS-style writings has also emerged in the fields of international law and comparative law over the past two decades. Duncan Kennedy, a Harvard law professor who, along with Unger, was one of the movement`s key figures, said that in the early days of critical legal studies, « almost everyone on the network was a white man interested in the radical politics of the `60s or radical sentiments of some sort. Some came from Marxist origin, others from democratic reforms. [14] Kennedy stressed the dual nature of critical jurisprudence, both as a network of left-wing academics/activists and as scholarly literature: in line with their position on the political left, CLS researchers have a common dissatisfaction with the established legal and political order, and in particular liberalism, which they consider to be the dominant political ideology. CLS shows how liberalism describes the world according to categories that exist as dualities: subjective-objective, man-woman, public-private, others, individual-community, etc. These dualities are sometimes referred to by CLS theorists as paired opposites. CLS then breaks down the dualities and shows how they create an ideology that promotes the interests of the ruling class. CLS theorists also condemn the individualism that liberal society promotes, and they call for a renewed focus on communal rather than individual values. In particular, they oppose capitalism as an economic system, and they regard liberalism as the greatest apologist for capitalism. On the occasion of the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, women served as editors of leading legal journals at the top 16 law schools in America. To commemorate this historic moment, Duke hosted a one-day conference in Washington, D.C., attended by all editors, eminent academics and practitioners, the deans of the law schools of Chicago, NYU, Virginia, Duke and UCLA, and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The 16 EICs also collaborated on a special joint publication entitled Women & Law, a collection of 14 essays written by prominent women in the legal community. In addition to the context of the interpretation of the law, critical legal studies also emerged in response to their political context, namely an environment in which the social democratic regulation concluded after the Second World War had become canonical[21], and the active dispute over the organization of society declined sharply and effectively anchored a dominant consensus on social organization, which Unger described as a « combination of neoliberal orthodoxy, state capitalism and compensatory redistribution through taxes and transfers. » [22] Critical jurists have questioned this consensus and attempted to use legal theory as a means of exploring other forms of social and political organization. The British movement for critical legal studies began around a similar time to its American counterpart. However, he focused on a number of conferences held each year, including the Critical Legal Conference and the National Critical Lawyers Group. There are still a number of fault lines in the Community; between theory and practice, between those who look at Marxism and those who have worked on deconstruction, between those who explicitly seek political commitment and those who work in aesthetics and ethics. CLS comprises several subgroups with fundamentally different, even contradictory, points of view. Feminist legal theory examines the role of gender in law. Critical Racial Theory (CRT) examines the role of race in law.