Critical legal studies was a movement in legal thought in the 1970s and 80s committed to shaping society based on a vision of human personality devoid of hidden interests and class domination perceived in existing legal institutions. Adherents of the movement sought to destabilize traditional conceptions of law, and to unravel and challenge existing legal institutions. The more constructive members, such as Roberto Mangabeira Unger, sought to rebuild these institutions as an expression of human coexistence and not just a provisional truce in a brutal struggle, and were seen as the most powerful voices and the only way forward for the movement. Unger is one of the last standing members of the movement to continue to try to develop it in new directions—namely, to make legal analysis the basis of institutional imagination.
The abbreviations "CLS" and "Crit" are sometimes used to refer to the movement and its adherents.
Read more about Critical Legal Studies: History, Themes, Continued Influence
Famous quotes containing the words critical, legal and/or studies:
“Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest.... It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“It has come to this, that the friends of liberty, the friends of the slave, have shuddered when they have understood that his fate was left to the legal tribunals of the country to be decided. Free men have no faith that justice will be awarded in such a case.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage. That is a commonplace truth, but one to which my studies are always bringing me back. It is the central point in my conception. I see it at the end of all my reflections.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)