Critical Legal Studies Movement
Beginning in the late 1970s, Critical Legal Studies (CLs) unsettled the professional legal consciousness that underwrote American legal institutions and practices. Crits engaged in a variety of political activities—including fights to reform courses and academic requirements, efforts to reconstitute legal scholarship and to transform legal pedagogy, historical revisionism, and countless talks, debates, tenure fights, symposia, and miscellaneous forms of professional activism and public provocations—each directed at the reconstruction of the legal academy and, in the process, the reorientation of the next generation of American legal professionals.
Over the course of a little more than a decade, roughly between 1976 and 1990, CLS became a controversial left and heterodox alternative to Chicago School law and economics and to conventional “liberal” legalism. It also embodied youth and novelty in law, and it became identified with a fierce generational conflict that marked life within American law schools in those years. According to some, it threatened the foundations of legal education. By the second half of the 1980s, CLS also confronted a variety of newer critical heterodoxies, including those identified with critical race theory and feminist legal thought, both of which drew in part on insights and perspectives that had emerged within CLS.
This conference, shaped by the opening of a CLS archive at Mudd Library at Princeton University, will explore the emergence of the critical legal studies movement within the legal academy during the 1970s and 1980s. We expect to situate the “movement” within longer histories of legal thought and also within broader and more global perspectives on legal movements. We will attend to questions of rise and decline, as well as to the practices and diverse streams — personal, political, cultural, and intellectual — that shaped the shifting content of CLS. We will not ignore the powerful roles that race and gender and class and hierarchy played in that history. Beyond the exploration of this deep and complex history, we hope the conference will also spark a discussion of the continuing or renewed possibilities for critique, dissent, and heterodox positions within powerful American institutions.