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:
“To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“You must train the children to their studies in a playful manner, and without any air of constraint, with the further object of discerning more readily the natural bent of their respective characters.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)