Heir to the American legal realism of the early twentieth century, the Movement of Critical Legal Studies – hereinafter CL – raises the banner of the imprecision of the law. However, he goes beyond the realist thesis, asserting that this is not due to a simple linguistic or formal problem, but to a real manifestation of a “contradiction” or a set of substantial contradictions underlying liberalism, understood as an ideological, economic and political tradition on which the American Way of Life was built. In addition, CLS has had a practical impact on legal education as it has been the inspiration and goal of Georgetown University Law Center`s alternative first-year program (called “Curriculum B,” known as “Section 3” within the school). In the UK, Kent and Birkbeck sought to incorporate critical legal knowledge into the legal studies curriculum, including an LLM based on critical legal theory at Birkbeck Law School. Several research centers and institutions offer CLS-based teaching and research courses in a variety of areas of law, including human rights, jurisprudence, constitutional theory, and criminal justice. Duncan Kennedy, a Harvard law professor who, along with Unger, was one of the movement`s key figures, said that in the early days of critical legal studies, “almost everyone on the web was white men with some interest in the sixties. radical political style or radical feelings of one kind or another. Some came for Marxist reasons, others for democratic reforms. [14] Kennedy pointed to the dual nature of critical legal studies, such as a network of left-wing academics/activists and academic literature: this circumstance was the predominant practice of legal analysis, which Unger calls the “reasonable method of elaboration.” [16] A close descendant of nineteenth-century doctrinal formalism, which, through legal analysis, attempted to define the “intrinsic legal content of one. free society” [17] treated the method of reasoned elaboration of legal documents as if they contained an “ideal element”, an inherent legal substance underlying the contradictions and ambiguities of the legal text. [18] According to the practice of reasoned elaboration, this inherent legal substance forms a prescriptive system that judges gradually discover by arguing through the policies and principles of law, without calling into question the “basic institutional arrangements of the market economy, democratic politics and society outside the market and the state.” [19] The critical jurisprudence movement emerged in the mid-1970s as a network of left-wing law professors in the United States who developed the realist thesis of vagueness in the service of left-wing ideals.
According to Roberto Unger, the movement “only existed until the late 1980s as an organizing force. Their life as a movement lasted just over a decade. [13] Mesa, D.A. (2002). Cracks in Contemporary Legal Thought: The “Critical Legal Studies” movement. Legal criterion 1 (2), pp. 129-159. Scholars associated with critical legal studies often identified with the movement in a variety of ways: by including in their articles a keynote address mentioning the Conference on Critical Legal Studies, and by providing contact information for the organization by attending CCLS conferences and citing the work of other critical jurists. A bibliography of CLS work compiled in 1984 by Duncan Kennedy and Karl Klare and published in the Yale Law Journal included dozens of authors and hundreds of books. [5] Although the CLS (like most schools and movements) did not produce a single monolithic current of thought, several common themes can generally be traced back to the works of its followers. Éstas incluyen: For more information on critical law studies, check out this article in the University of Minnesota Journal of Theory and Practice, this Harvard Law Review article, and this article on the University of Pennsylvania Faculty Scholarship. CLS was officially founded in 1977 at the conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but its roots go back to earlier when many of its founding members participated in social activism around the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War.
The founders of CLS borrowed from non-legal fields such as social theory, political philosophy, economics, and literary theory. Well-known CLS theorists include Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Robert W. Gordon, and Duncan Kennedy. Motivated elaboration was a detrimental influence for several reasons, Unger and others argued: they downplayed the contingent nature of the law as a product of agreements and obligations, rather than treating it as containing a coherent normative system that had to be discovered simply by interpreting the law. ; disguises the way judges usurp authority by denying their own role in legislation; And finally, reasonable elaboration has prevented the use of the law as a mechanism for social change. [20] The British movement of critical law firms began at a time similar to that of its American counterpart. However, she focused on a number of conferences held each year, including the Critical Legal Conference and the National Group of Critical Lawyers. There are still a number of failures in the community; between theory and practice, between those who look at Marxism and those who have worked in deconstruction, between those who explicitly seek political compromises and those who work in aesthetics and ethics. In addition to the context of the interpretation of the law, critical legal studies have also been developed in response to its political context, namely a scenario in which the social-democratic arrangement concretized after the Second World War had become canonical [21] and had declined sharply in an active conflict over the organization of society.
Effectively anchor a dominant consensus on social organization, which Unger describes as a “combination of neoliberal orthodoxy, state capitalism, and compensatory redistribution through taxes and transfers.” [22] Critical jurists have questioned this consensus and attempted to use legal theory as a means of exploring other forms of social and political organization. Critical jurisprudence has its intellectual origins in the American legal realism movement in the 1930s. Before the 1930s, American jurisprudence was dominated by a formalistic account of how courts adjudicate cases, a narrative that states that judges rule on cases based on clear legal rules and grounds that justify a single outcome.