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Article: Critical Legal Studies
- Article from:
- West's Encyclopedia of American Law
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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 ...