LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Critical Legal Studies: Movement
built 640 days ago
[The Critical Legal Studies movement's] indeterminacy claim was that standard legal materials -- statutes, constitutions, and precedent -- often failed to dictate a single outcome. Critical scholars demonstrated over and over again that legal rules and conventional methods of interpretation could, in the right hands, produce wildly different results. Some scholars went beyond this claim to assert that not just legal materials, but ... underlying ideologies, were indeterminate . . . .
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The origins of critical legal studies are to be found in the American legal realist movement of the 1930s. The underlying contradictions of american democracy were revealed by the worst economic crisis in american history. The reactionary jurisprudence of the US supreme court led President Roosevelt to attempt to "pack" the court. US Supreme court justices enjoy life tenure and cannot be removed from office. However the US constitution is silent as to the number of justices. Since Roosevelt could not remove the justice who's constitutional interpretations were undermining the relief policies of the New Deal (a program to install a modest welfare state in america) he attempted - unsuccessfully - to appoint many new judges.
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Critical race theorists and critical feminist theorists retort that at least rights go some way to establishing the conditions by which oppressed groups can secure a seat at the negotiating table. To argue from the rights paradigm is to seek recognition from the state, as the ultimate arbiter of power relations and the grantor of rights, that a claim is worth official recognition. Legal rights are tradable commodities; their recognition can be traded in for particular benefits as well as being a bargaining chip for gaining further advances, a process which does not necessarily undermine the legitimacy of the claimant. While to some extent there is an inherent recognition of power imbalances in the assertion of rights it is an inescapable fact of the legal positivist world order. To suggest that all oppressed groups are co-opted by the hallucinatory pull of rights is to deny them their agency and their ability to pursue a range of actions, with rights as but one tool in an overall strategy for the advancement of a social movement.[84]
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Many who identify with the critical legal studies movement resist or reject efforts to systematize their own work. They seek to express claims of textual ambiguity and historical contingency in their own methods. Influenced by post-modernist developments in cultural studies, these critical scholars prefer episodic interventions to systematized theories. Some critical scholars press hard on a particular line of argument, and then shift away from it in order to avoid treating the argument itself as a kind of fetish or talisman.
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RP: Perhaps you could begin by saying something about the Critical Legal Studies movement in the USA. What is its relationship to feminism? And where do you see your own work as fitting in?
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Others accuse the movement of being nihilistic, of destroying the foundations of legal reasoning without putting anything in its place or without even making positive recommendations for change. They find CLS's prescriptions for the future to be too vague and utopian for practical application. Another widespread complaint is that the writings of CLS scholars are unnecessarily obscure, opaque, and turgid.
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