REVIEW ESSAY: The Limits of Critique and the forces of Law

Social Science Research Network, 2017

Professors Hanoch Dagan and Avihay Dorfman’s article Just Relationships is a fundamental reinterpretation of the moral ideals of large swaths of private law. Its significance, however, may go beyond even that broad ambition. In this Response, I suggest that Just Relationships is also an exemplar — perhaps par excellence — of an emergent form of critical discourse, which may itself foreshadow a paradigm shift in contemporary critical legal scholarship. That new form of scholarship might usefully be dubbed “the new legal criticism.” The label serves partly as an echo of the “New Criticism” movement that emerged in literary criticism in the middle of the twentieth-century, which, in methodological ways, the new legal criticism very much resembles. But primarily, the label “new legal criticism” suggests that this ascendant group of legal scholars articulates a different point of departure for critical thinking about law — particularly for critical thinking about private law — from that ...

Law and Critique, 2008

This is the first issue of the twentieth volume of Law and Critique, the prime international critical legal theory journal. When we started in the dark late Eighties, law meant exclusively positive law, legal scholarship was committed to the writing of footnotes to judicial decisions and jurisprudence veered between sterile positivism and the celebratory moralism of rights. Legal theory generated a feeling of terminal boredom for student and academic alike. In the intervening period, Law and Critique helped change the landscape of legal scholarship and pedagogy. Articles on semiotics, rhetoric, literature, aesthetics and psychoanalysis have introduced a much wider conception of legality of which state law is only one part. A variety of critical schools, such as postmodernism, phenomenology, postcolonialism, critical race, queer theory, the ethics of otherness, the ontology of plural singularity, the critique of biopolitics and post-politics have been pioneered in these pages and created a new and stronger link between theory and practice. Nowadays even established learned journals carry articles on the 'deconstruction' of doctrine or the 'legal aesthetics' of drama, poetry or the Constitution. It was Law and Critique, as well as a few other radical and theoretical journals, which brought legal scholarship back to the centre of intellectual debate from the outer periphery to which it had been consigned by apologetic jurisprudence. Throughout the last 20 years, Law and Critique retained a strong connection with the Critical Legal Conference. Since 1984, every first weekend in September, the CLC brings together critical and radical legal scholars from all over the world. It has been a phenomenal success despite its modesty. The Critical Legal Conference is exactly that: a conference without organisation, presidents and secretaries, members and subscriptions. The Critical Legal Conference is a transient community; a 'coming' or 'inoperative' community that just lasts for 3 days every year, without orthodoxies, exclusions or stars, which gets down to the business of thinking and

Critical Legal Studies (CLS): Contextualizing the Jurisprudential Basis, Nature And Scope, 2023

This paper analyzes the Critical Legal Studies movement, the key proponents; their main contribution to jurisprudential debate(s); and the attendant criticisms against their philosophy.

Cleveland State Law Review, 1990

The American Journal of Jurisprudence, 1985

Law and Critique, 1999

This article, which should not in any sense be taken to reflect the views of the Editorial Board of Law and Critique, argues that the political project of critical legal studies in England remains overwhelmingly in the future. Lacking academic identity, political purpose and ethical conviction, critical legal scholarship in England has been too insecure in its institutional place and too unconscious of its individual and collective desires to resist absorption into the institution. Critical legal studies – as distinct from feminist legal studies, gay and lesbian studies or critical race theory –has tended to teach and so reproduce the core curriculum in a passive and negative mode. Resistant, ostensibly for historical and political reasons, to self-criticism and indeed to self-reflection upon their institutional practices, critical scholars have ended up repeating the law that they came to critique and overcome.

Finnish Yearbook of International Law

Legal Theory, 1999

This chapter focuses on the relationship between critical legal studies as an intellectual movement in American law schools, and law and economics, in both Chicago and other forms. The critical legal studies critique of law and economics can reasonably be understood as an effort to foster alternative, radical approaches to law and economics that acknowledge and proceed from politically-charged contradictions within the discipline. The intellectual engagement between critical legal studies and law and economics over the last twenty years has not mediated the contradiction between the critical legal studies and law and economics views of law.

Law & Policy, 1984