CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES IN A NUTSHELL

Abstract

Th is paper is a brief general introduction to the American “Critical Legal Studies” movement (CLS). Th e fi rst part of the paper presents the history of CLS as a movement: the founders’ profi le, the meaning of its political-academic project, its growth and decline and, especially, its ideas as a project to reform legal education. Th e second part off ers some keys to CLS as a trend of legal thought: its conception of the very task of theorising, its intellectual project and its evolution in the framework of contemporary American legal thought, the main theroretical infl uences on CLS (legal realism, neomarxist Critical Th eory, and postmodern trends), and some of its basic tenets or lines of thought: legal indeterminacy, connection between law and politics, views on legal reasoning, critique of empiricist legal sociology, “constitutive” role of law in society and its “cognitive” ideological role.