Critical Legal Studies

Critical legal studies (CLS) as a general approach may be said to have emerged out of the same concerns and influences as the critical traditions in psychology and other social sciences and to have emerged on a roughly corresponding schedule. Thus, one can trace the impact of Marxism, critical theory, structuralist and poststructuralist scholarship, hermeneutics, and deconstruction, of psychoanalysis, of relativism and postmodernism, of postcolonial critique, and of critical race studies and feminist theory. The social effects of law in terms of equity of access, discrimination and oppression, the degradation of the environment, and the sustaining of the grip of global capitalism are all concerns that cross disciplinary boundaries. With reference to the fetishizing within mainstream legal studies of the so-called rule of law, a ...