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Critical Legal Studies
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A constraint on the Critical Legal Studies group is the focus on law. Quite often, the presumption of their work is that strategies of recognition—powerfully evoking, for instance, an unemployed Latina or black mother’s confrontation with the obstacles posed by the legal system and government bureaucracies, or the situation of a person of color facing juries and other facets of the criminal justice system—will have an impact on the practice or implementation of justice within the systems of laws available. In effect, the structure of interpretive legal argumentation permits criticisms of the system only to the extent to which the criticisms call for, at best, systemic adjustment. Such an approach renders revolutionary or more radical approaches to questions of law at best "interpretations" worth considering but performatively limited. As a consequence, the form of critical discussions of race that emerges in the Critical Legal Studies movement is usually limited by the impact of juridical conceptions of how race will be negotiated in the sphere of litigation and legislation. How about race in civil and often not so civil society?
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Although the intellectual origins of the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) can be generally traced all the way back to American Legal Realism, as a distinct scholarly movement the CLS fully emerged only by the late 1970s. Many first-wave CLS scholars entered legal education, having been profoundly influenced by the twin experiences of the civil rights movement and the anti-war movements of the late 1960s. What started off as a critical stance towards American domestic politics eventually translated into a critical stance towards the dominant legal ideology of the modern Western society. Drawing on the works of the Frankfurt school (except Jürgen Habermas) and French poststructuralism, the "crits" sought to demystify the numerous myths at the heart of the mainstream legal practice.
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The sphere of the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) encompasses a number of domains including the feminist legal theory, critical race theory and post modernism. One of the recently introduced field of legal studies is the Islamic Legal Studies Program (ILSP) which has been founded by the Harvard Law Schoolin 1991. The principal aim behind its establishment is the promotion of the Islamic laws and creating awareness amongst the Muslim and the Non-Muslim masses regarding the significance of the Islamic legal system. Various scholars and erudite intellectuals from all over the world are chipping in the Islamic Legal Studies Program (ILSP)... leading to the promulgation of the Islamic laws in the Eastern and the Western parts of the world.
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Critical Legal Studies was born during the late 1960s among a group of student activists and younger faculty at Yale Law School. By 1977 C.L.S. adherents had formed a network that now has about 400 members. Its annual conference today attracts roughly 1,000 participants. Proponents hold positions at some of the nation's most prestigious legal institutions, including Stanford and George-town. But with three of the best-known crits--Duncan Kennedy, Morton Horwitz and Roberto Unger--among those on its 64-member faculty, Harvard has become the leading C.L.S.
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The Critical Legal Studies movement is heavily influenced by the deconstruction movement. Jack Balkin explains how deconstruction as a literary and philosophical tool migrated into the law, in his 2005 Cardozo Law Review article Deconstruction's Legal Career:
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Critical legal studies bzw. Kritische Rechtslehre wird eine Bewegung in der Rechtsphilosophie bzw. Rechtssoziologie genannt, die mit der Methoden der Kritischen Theorie (Frankfurter Schule) vergleichbare Methoden auf das Recht anwendet. CLS und Crit sind Abkürzungen, die informell verwendet werden, um sich auf die Bewegung und ihre Anhänger zu beziehen.
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Critical Legal Studies