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Critical Legal Studies: Law
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Concerning the first point, Legal Consciousness Studies are nourished in the political commitment of the Critical Theorists as well as the empirical aims of the Law & Society founders. Nevertheless, they distance themselves both from Critical Legal Studies and from the initial tendency of Law & Society (gap studies). With respect to the first they reject the disregard for empirical research and knowledge of the concrete sociolegal reality (law-in-action). The distance from the latter is a condemnation of their lack of commitment to a position independent of the dominant political thought and the circles of power. But the way in which LCS achieved this double distancing continues to occasion problems: The excessive emphasis placed on the constituted character of the social world dilutes the distinction between the exterior and interior of subjectivity, in such as way that the critique loses its referent. Everything is reduced to a scattered and random set of consciousnesses and social practices that practically explain themselves tautologically.
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Critical legal theory should be more widely taught as a useful way of analyzing the law. Recent critiques of CLS do not diminish its usefulness as a tool for teaching critical thinking. Many professors... find it difficult to convey the essential concept of CLS in a way students can grasp. This article suggests that the popular movie The Matrix may provide a method of explaining critical theory to students.
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Critical legal studies refers to a movement in legal thought that applied methods similar to those of critical theory (the Frankfurt School) to law. The abbreviations "CLS" and "Crit" are sometimes used to refer to the movement and its adherents. Overly simplified, Crit postulates notions such as: Law is simply politics. Legal language is a false discourse that helps perpetuate hierarchies: Man over women, rich over poor, majorities over minorities.
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Critical legal studies in Britain claims essentially to be a progressive intellectual challenge to the dominant traditions in legal scholarship. It has given a higher priority to the task of integrating legal theory within social theory than to the critical examination of professional legal practice. In other words, it is the activity of the law school, rather than what goes on in the rest of the world, which has been chosen as the principal focus of critical scholarship.
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The Socio-Legal Studies programme offers a range of units, suitable for graduates from a very wide range of disciplines (including Arts, Social Sciences, Natural Sciences, and Law), who have an interest in the way law works in society. The programme of study is interdisciplinary. Students take a core of three compulsory units from Sociology, two further compulsory courses from Law tailored specifically for socio-legal students without law backgrounds, and an optional subject that can be taken almost anywhere in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law (and even beyond in Social Anthropology). A dissertation completes the programme.
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''Critical legal studies'' is a term laden with emotional overtones and mystery. The general public has been introduced to it - obliquely, anyway – in The New Yorker, for which Calvin Trillin wrote a piece, ''The Law at Harvard.'' At fairly regular intervals The New York Times has carried stories – battlefield communiques, as it were, from Cambridge, Mass. C.L.S. lies at the root of wild rumors of departures from Harvard Law School and of a faculty too divided even to make appointments. Making the subject all the more intriguing, Paul D. Carrington, the dean of the Duke University Law School, proclaimed that C.L.S. law teachers are morally bound to resign, for it is immoral, at best, to profess to teach a subject, law, in which one does not believe. (Is it appropriate, he asked, for an atheist to teach theology?
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