Much writing in critical legal studies has been devoted to laying bare the contradictions in liberal thought. There have been attacks and counterattacks on the liberal position and on the more conservative law and economics position. Kelman demonstrates that any critique of law and economics is inextricably tied to a broader critique of liberalism.
Contemporary legal thought has been powerfully influenced by Critical Legal Studies, a school of legal scholars whose work has sustained a continuing radical critique of established legal doctrines. In this essential reference work, Richard Bauman presents the most thorough, up-to-date guide available for this essential literature. In addition to providing the basic bibliographic information, Bauman offers a set of effective introductions to contextualize and explain the work being surveyed. He has created a fundamental handbook not only for the law but also for politics and radical thought.
This is a unique guide to one of the most exciting develpments within contemporary jurisprudence. It systematically applies a critical philosophy to the substance of common law, overviewing its politics and cultural significance.
Critical legal studies is the most important development in progressive thinking about law of the past half century. It has inspired the practice of legal analysis as institutional imagination, exploring, with the materials of the law, alternatives for society. The Critical Legal Studies Movement was written as the manifesto of the movement by its central figure. This new edition includes a revised version of the original text, preceded by an extended essay in which its author discusses what is happening now and what should happen next in legal thought.
Critical theory, characteristically linked with the politics of theoretical engagement, covers the manifold of the connections between theory and praxis. This thought-provoking Research Handbook captures the broad range of those connections as far as legal thought is concerned and retains an emphasis both on the politics of theory, and on the notion of theoretical engagement. The first part examines the question of definition and tracks the origins and development of critical legal theory along its European and North American trajectories. The second part looks at the thematic connections between the development of legal theory and other currents of critical thought such as; Feminism, Marxism, Critical Race Theory, varieties of post-modernism, as well as the various ‘turns’ (ethical, aesthetic, political) of critical legal theory. The third and final part explores particular fields of law, addressing the question how the field has been shaped by critical legal theory, or what critical approaches reveal about the field, with the clear focus on opportunities for social transformation.
Essays by noted theorists such as Drucilla Cornell, Nancy Fraser, Peter Goodrich, and Gayatri Spivak provide a bridge between critical cultural studies in the humanities and the Critical Legal Studies movement demonstrating the transdisciplinary nature of both fields.
In recent years, there has been an explosion of writing on the topic of human dignity across a plethora of different academic disciplines. Despite this explosion of interest, there is one group – critical legal scholars – that has devoted little if any attention to human dignity. This book argues that these scholars should attend to human dignity, a concept rich enough to support a whole range of progressive ambitions, particularly in the field of international law. It synthesizes certain liberal arguments about the good of self-authorship with the critical legal philosophy of Roberto Unger and the capabilities approach to agency of Amartya Sen, to formulate a unique conception of human dignity. The author argues how human dignity flows from an individual’s capacity for self-authorship as defined by the set of expressive capabilities s/he possesses, and the book demonstrates how this conception can enrich our understanding of international human rights law by making the amplification of human dignity its fundamental orientation.
This well-known 'underground' classic critique of legal education is available for the first time in book form. This edition contains commentary by leading legal educations.
The Critical Legal Pocketbook provides the tools for law students to uncover the hidden intricacies of law. Law creates an ethical and rational facade for itself, but beneath the surface you will find that it has its monsters; the leviathan of the state, the golems of racism and misogyny, the hydra of coloniality, the vampire of capitalism. These roam throughout law's subterranean structures. At the same time, law is often painted as a heroic defence of the innocent against these terrors. Legal education likes to forget the ways that law was essential in generating structures of domination and subjection. The Critical Legal Pocketbook casts a different light on the law, illuminating some of the ways in which law (and legal education in particular) nourishes its monsters - and sometimes works to make these monsters look tame and docile. Drawing on recent developments in critical legal theory, it considers other dimensions of law: its ambiguity, susceptibility to capture, and its potential as a site of rupture. Edited by students at the University of Warwick, and written by expert critical legal researchers and practitioners, the Critical Legal Pocketbook is essential reading for law students in the UK and other common law jurisdictions. The Pocketbook includes twenty five substantive chapters on traditional legal subjects from Contract Law to Human Rights, and from Mooting to Property Law. Interspersed among these are fifteen key concept notes that aim to help students grasp the complexity and plurality of critical analyses of law.
Normative Jurisprudence aims to reinvigorate normative legal scholarship that both criticizes positive law and suggests reforms for it, on the basis of stated moral values and legalistic ideals. It looks sequentially and in detail at the three major traditions in jurisprudence – natural law, legal positivism and critical legal studies – that have in the past provided philosophical foundations for just such normative scholarship. Over the last fifty years or so, all of these traditions, although for different reasons, have taken a number of different turns – toward empirical analysis, conceptual analysis or Foucaultian critique – and away from straightforward normative criticism. As a result, normative legal scholarship – scholarship that is aimed at criticism and reform – is now lacking a foundation in jurisprudential thought. The book criticizes those developments and suggests a return, albeit with different and in many ways larger challenges, to this traditional understanding of the purpose of legal scholarship.
