CLS- Definitions & A Brief Introduction

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Critical Legal Studies (CLS) defined*1
Roberto Mangabeira Unger of Harvard Law School in his first book announced that he
had discovered "the context of ideas and sentiments within which philosophy and politics
must now be practiced." Since that time, he has become a prominent thinker in Critical
Legal Studies (CLS), a movement that, in his own words, "has undermined the central
ideas of modern legal thought and put another conception of law in their place."
CLS was officially started in 1977 at the conference at the University of Wisconsin‐
Madison as a revolutionary theory and later turned into a movement. Unger, a leading
CLS theorist, has described the law faculty of those days as "a priesthood that had lost
their faith and kept their jobs." CLS has steadily grown in influence. Although CLS has
been largely a U.S. movement, it was influenced to a great extent by European
philosophers, such as Marx, Engels, Weber; Max Horkheimer Herbert Marcuse, Antonio
Gramsci, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida etc. Besides Unger, some noted CLS theorists
includes Robert W. Gordon, Morton J. Horwitz, Duncan Kennedy, Karl Klare, and
Catharine A. Mackinnon.
CLS is a family of new legal theories share commitments to criticize not merely particular
legal rules or outcomes, but larger structures of conventional legal thought and practice.
The CLS movement grew from a generation that questioned authority in America. Within
this social and political context, the very notion of law was questioned not only in terms
of what legal positivist’s have traditionally asked; namely, “What is the law.” , but also
asked “what does the law do”?
CLS includes several subgroups with fundamentally different, even contradictory, views:
Feminist Legal Theory: which examines the role of gender in the law; Critical Race
Theory: which is concerned with the role of race in the law; Postmodernism: a critique
of the law influenced by developments in literary theory; and a subcategory that
emphasizes political economy and the economic context of legal decisions and issues.
Dominant Themes of the CLS movement are:
(a) Indeterminacy: Asserts that laws do not by necessity produce specific outcomes
(b) Contradiction: rejects the idea that a legal doctrine “contains a single, coherent,
and justifiable view of human relations
(c) Legitimation and false consciousness: Law serves the powerful, not in an
immediate and direct way, but instead through “legitmation”. False consciousness is
a failure to see the exploitative aspects of the current system.
* Presented by Mr. Chandra Shekhar Khadka, a LL.M. student, Nepal Law Campus, Kathmandu (11 Aug 2015)

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CLS has been defined in different legal literature as;
Black's Law Dictionary : 1. " A school of thought advancing the idea that the legal
system perpetuates the status quo in terms of economics, race and gender by using
manipulable concept and by creating an imaginary world of social harmony regulated
by law. The Marxist wing of this school focuses on socioeconomic issues. Fem‐crits
emphasize gender hierarchy, whereas critical race theorist focus on racial
subordinations.
2. "The body of work produced by adherents to this school of thought"
Wex Law Dictionary (Cornell University Law School‐Legal Information
Institute): "Critical legal studies (CLS) is a theory that challenges and overturns
accepted norms and standards in legal theory and practice. Proponents of this theory
believe that logic and structure attributed to the law grow out of the power
relationships of the society. The law exists to support the interests of the party or
class that forms it and is merely a collection of beliefs and prejudices that legitimize
the injustices of society. The wealthy and the powerful use the law as an instrument
for oppression in order to maintain their place in hierarchy. Many in the CLS
movement want to overturn the hierarchical structures of domination in the modern
society and many of them have focused on the law as a tool in achieving this goal.
CLS is also a membership organization that seeks to advance its own cause and that
of its members."
Farlex Inc., Online Legal Dictionary: "CLS is an intellectual movement whose
members argue that law is neither neutral nor value free but is in fact inseparable
from politics. CLS seeks to fundamentally alter Jurisprudence, exposing it as not a
rational system of accumulated wisdom but an ideology that supports and makes
possible an unjust political system."
Dr. S.R.Myneni in "Jurisprudence (Legal Theory)" defined CLS movements as:
"People pursuing critical approaches to the study of law and society and trying to
develop approaches emphasizing the ideological character of legal doctrine and its
internal structures."
Wayne Morrison " Jurisprudence: from Greeks to Post‐modernism" defined as:
"A post‐positivist enterprise involving (i) a critique of the 'objective' scientific method
which is seen to underlie traditional scholarship with the claim that 'interpretative
understanding must replace positivism (ii) a change in the way law is viewed." CLS is
a reflection of a contemporary loss of faith in all forms of thinking that make the
social structures of the modern world appear natural, inevitable, inherently justifiable
and unquestionably progressive.”

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M.D.A. Freeman "Lloyd's Introduction to Jurispurdence": Critical Legal Studies
(CLS) burst on the scene in the United States in the late 1970s with a series of
conferences. It grew out of dissatisfaction with current legal scholarship. It was more
a ferment than a movement with those who identified as "Crits" a diverse group
perhaps united only by their commitment to a more egalitarian society. Off shoots
are critical feminist jurisprudence, critical race theory, the Lat‐crit movement and
other examples of outsider jurisprudence, such as "queer jurisprudence".
Professor Hilare McCoubrey & Nigel D. White "Textbook on Jurisprudence": The
Critical Legal Studies movement, which initially emerged in the United States in the
1970s in part as a successor to the American Realist Movement, is essentially offering
a radical alternative to established legal theories. It puts forward the preposition that
all other legal theories are fundamentally flawed in their belief that sense and order
can be discerned from a reasoned analysis of law and the legal system. Critical Legal
Theory not only denies the possibility of discovering a universal foundation for law
through pure reason, but sees the whole enterprise of jurisprudence..... as operating
to confer a spurious legitimacy on law and legal system.
Patricia J Williams "Alchemy of Race & Rights: Diary of a Law Professor": "An
expression of the angst‐the self‐doubting‐ of legal academics at the end of the period
of modernity. How to conceive of the relationship of law and person? To understand
the meaning of contemporary legal subjectivity, it seems to the adherents of CLS that
we must first understand and locate the (late‐) modern person (conscious of his/her
gender and race)".
William Ewaldt " Unger's Philosophy: A Critical Legal Study": Professor Duncan
Kennedy, one of the leaders of CLS, described it as "a ragtag band of leftover '60s
people and young people with nostalgia for the great events of 15 years ago.
According to Kennedy & Karl Klare, CLS was "concerned with the relationship of
legal scholarship and practice to the struggle to create a more humane, egalitarian,
and democratic society".
CLS has been defined differently as above and also criticized in many ways as: lacking
coherence, fraught with the very contradictions that it identifies in liberalism, the
movement of being nihilistic, destroying the foundations of legal reasoning without
putting anything in its place or without even making positive recommendations for
change, CLS prescriptions for the future to be too vague and utopian for practical
application and the writings of CLS scholars are unnecessarily obscure, opaque, and
turgid. Despite these criticisms, CLS has greatly influenced the study and theory of
the law it earned an accepted position in law and has permanently changed the
landscape of legal theory.

4. 4
Bibliography
1. Black's Law Dictionary (9th ed.)
2. Freeman M.D.A.,( 8th ed.) (2008), Lloyd's Introduction To Jurisprudence, Sweet and Maxwell
Ltd., London.
3. McCoubrey Hilare & Nigel D. White (1999), Text Book on Jurisprudence, Blackstone Press
Limited, London
4. Morrison, Wayne,( Reprint 1997), Jurisprudence: from Greeks to Post‐modernism, Lawman
(India) Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi, India
5. Dr. Myneni S.R., Jurisprudence (Legal Theory) (2013), Asia Law House, Hyderabad, India
6. Pappas D. George (2006), Jurisprudence, Critical Legal Studies Movement, International
Center for Legal Studies, http:// www.legaltutors.com/Jurisprudence/Lecture Notes/Critical
Legal Studies Lecture.pdf (9 August 2015)
7. Ewaldt William (1988), Unger's Philosophy: A Critical Legal Study, University of Pennsylvania
Law School, http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/ faculty_scholarship/1284 ( 9 August 2015)
8. Wex Law Dictionary, Legal Information Institute, Cornell University Law School, https://
www.law.cornell.edu/ wex/critical_legal_theory (9 August 2015)
9. Chayes Abram et. all, The Bridge, http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/ bridge/ CriticalTheory/
critical1.htm ( 10 August 2015)
10. Farlex Inc., The Free Dictionary, http://legal‐dictionary.thefreedictionary.com /Critical Legal
Studies ( 10 August 2015)
11. Wikimedia Foundation Inc.,Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_legal_studies
( 10 August 2015)