Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Critical legal studies
Summary
Critical legal studies (CLS) is a school of critical theory that developed in the United States during the 1970s. CLS adherents claim that laws are devised to maintain the status quo of society and thereby codify its biases against marginalized groups.
Despite wide variation in the opinions of critical legal scholars around the world, there is general consensus regarding the key goals of Critical Legal Studies:
to demonstrate the ambiguity and possible preferential outcomes of supposedly impartial and rigid legal doctrines.
to publicize historical, social, economic and psychological results of legal decisions
to demystify legal analysis and legal culture in order to impose transparency on legal processes so that they earn the general support of socially responsible citizens
The abbreviations "CLS" and "Crit" are sometimes used to refer to the movement and its adherents.
Considered "the first movement in legal theory and legal scholarship in the United States to have espoused a committed Left political stance and perspective", critical legal studies was committed to shaping society based on a vision of human personality devoid of the hidden interests and class domination that CLS scholars argued are at the root of liberal legal institutions in the West. According to CLS scholars Duncan Kennedy and Karl Klare, critical legal studies was "concerned with the relationship of legal scholarship and practice to the struggle to create a more humane, egalitarian, and democratic society."
During its period of peak influence, the critical legal studies movement caused considerable controversy within the legal academy. Members such as Roberto Mangabeira Unger have sought to rebuild these institutions as an expression of human coexistence and not just a provisional truce in a brutal struggle and were seen as the most powerful voices and the only way forward for the movement. Unger and other members of the movement continue to try to develop it in new directions, e.g., to make legal analysis the basis of developing institutional alternatives.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.