Critical Legal Theories

Catalog description

We will study the three most significant critical movements in legal academia that started out in the last quarter of the twentieth century - Critical Legal Studies (CLS), Critical Race Theory (CRT), and both dominance and cultural feminism - and continue to influence how many progressives think about social relations generally, and more particularly, the impact of law and the nature of legal reasoning. We will also consider a fourth critical movement that began in this century: the Law and Political Economy movement (LPE). We will examine, sympathetically but also critically, some of the key ideas associated with each of the movements. We will consider how each "school" drew on the others but also how they differentiated themselves. We will consider (on occasion) how those on the political Right and progressives outside the movements reacted to the (real or imagined) arguments that these critical theorists advanced. Elements used in grading: Attendance, class participation, written assignments.