Critical Legal Studies

An intellectual movement whose members argue that law is neither neutral nor value free but is in fact inseparable from politics.

Critical legal studies (CLS) is a sometimes revolutionary movement that challenges and seeks to overturn accepted norms and standards in legal theory and practice. CLS seeks to fundamentally alter Jurisprudence, exposing it as not a rational system of accumulated wisdom but an ideology that supports and makes possible an unjust political system. CLS scholars attempt to debunk the law's pretensions to determinacy, neutrality, and objectivity. The law, in CLS scholarship, is a tool used by the establishment to maintain its power and domination over an unequal status quo. Openly a movement of leftist politics, CLS seeks to subvert the philosophical and political authority of what it sees as an unjust social system. CLS advances a theoretical and practical project of reconstruction of the law and of society itself.

Critical Race Theory (CRT)CRT began in the mid-1970s when many intellectuals perceived that the civil rights movement of the 1960s had ended and that in fact many of its gains were being turned back. As a result, they began to develop new theories and concepts that would allow them to understand the causes and implications of these new developments. Like CLS, CRT gathers disparate scholars and theorists under a common heading. However, CRT is a less formally organized school of thought than CLS.

Critical race theorists share a number of themes. Like CLS, CRT finds major faults in liberalism and particular features of liberal jurisprudence that bear on race, including Affirmative Action, neutrality, and "color blindness." Many CRT writers, for example, dispute that the Constitution is or ever can be "color-blind."

that law is neither neutral nor value free but is in fact inseparable from politics.

Now how obvious is that?

From Semitic roots to Harvard University. Countering that is the whole point of Christianity.

ref: Julian Jaynes.

Johnny Suntrade

Law is definite. Politics is relative. Any retard that says mixing law and politics is a good thing is a liberal. It is true that laws are passed for political reasons, but it is also wrong. Like passing so many laws you can’t buy a gun. Or passing so many laws, you can’t drill for oil domestically.

hfr wrote: What they’re saying is that they want to use law to achieve their goals.

..... I see that as one goal. The other unspoken item on the agenda is the cooption and corruption of western jurisprudence in the same manner that religion, morality, culture, patriotism, and education have been dismantled by them. Their fundamental ambition is to destroy ALL existing institutions and belief systems so that they can re-write everything starting with a clean sheet of Marxist paper.

The Worst Political Ad Ever

http://www.glennbeck.com/2011/05/13/the-worst-political-ad-ever/

I had never heard of critical race theory until the woman on Beck’s TV show explained it. She’s a liberal and how he got her to come on the show is a mystery. Part of the theory asserts that your skin color is all that matters.

Up on the third floor of Griswold Hall on the Harvard Law School campus, you can find the handbill-festooned office of Professor Duncan Kennedy. In all the coverage you will read of the 2008 presidential election, the likelihood of your running across his name—other than right now, that is—is vanishingly small. Kennedy is a leftist whose disregard for conventional politics is severe. But he is also a link, strangely enough, between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. In 1971, Kennedy, a recent Yale Law School graduate, published an article in The Yale Review of Law and Social Action, of which Clinton was then an editor. The article was called “How the Law School Fails: A Polemic” and advocated a creed that Kennedy dubbed “legal hippieism.” In later years, Kennedy, a founder of the avant-garde Critical Legal Studies movement, would recommend that, in order to turn Harvard Law into a “counterhegemonic enclave,” it should admit students by lottery. Even later, he would be among the prime instigators of a campaign for faculty diversity that would consume the campus in the late eighties and early nineties, with students occupying the dean’s office, raising holy hell. Among the students sucked into that mêlée (though not into the dean’s office) was a young Obama. Source

Critical legal studies were quite the thing in the '90s. I hadn't heard of "Critical race theory" before. It didn't make as many waves.

CLS was supposed to be a challenge to what the law schools taught and how they worked. CRT sounds more like a rebranding of what minorities studies departments have been doing for a long time.

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