On "The Critical Legal Studies Movement

Law & Policy, 1984

Finnish Yearbook of International Law

Cleveland State Law Review, 1990

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.

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.

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 ...

2011

The Dalhousie Law Journal, 1989

Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies, 2014

A reply to critics tends to ensnare the author in a postscript version of the famous preface paradox: you feel under some rational pressure to defend everything you have written in the book, 1 and equally under rational pressure to acknowledge that some of what your critics say is true. Paradoxes are not easy to solve and I will not pretend that I can manage it here. I want to defend the arguments I have made in the book, but I also want to admit some mistakes and acknowledge the need for further clarifications and revisions. I am very grateful to the commentators for spending their time and effort on giving me this opportunity. Their comments raise serious concerns, and I hope to address most of them. The book forms part of the new Princeton Foundations of Contemporary Philosophy Series, edited by Scott Soames. The books in this series are meant to address a wide audience of philosophers and philosophy students who are assumed not to have any particular familiarity with the field the book covers, giving readers a sense of where the some of the main contemporary issues in that discipline lie, and what are the main arguments debated, while also making some original contribution to the field. The books in this series are certainly not meant to be state of the art accounts of the disciplines they cover; the editor urged us to make our own arguments and develop our own thoughts on the subjects we discuss, an encouragement I certainly welcomed. But it was not my intention to offer a new theory of law; I do not have one. Most commentators say that the book is a defense of exclusive legal positivism. I would not really call it that, but given the content of the book, I cannot complain that they mislabel the view. I certainly try to defend a view broadly within the legal positivist tradition. And, as I argue in chapter 4, I do tend to think of inclusive legal positivism as a bit of red herring. But my point in defending a certain version of legal positivism, combining insights and arguments from Kelsen, Hart, and Raz, with some of my previous work on social conventions, is not guided by the objective to defend "exclusive legal positivism"; as if there is a coherent, self-contained, view on the shelf rightly labeled thus, and the book just brings to the debate a collection of arguments in support of it. At least I really hope that this is not how the book is read.