Critical Legal Studies and the Campaign for American Law Schools

Trashing the Tables: The Critical Legal Studies Symposium of the Stanford Law Review, Then and Now

“…These attacks played a key role in weakening the CLS movement towards the end of the 1980s. Although most of the movement's leading lights have retired from teaching and/or passed away, their cardinal ideas continue to resonate in the United States and abroad (Baumgardner 2021). The CLS movement presented bold criticisms of legal scholarship, advocacy, and the dominant norms within the legal profession, criticisms that have proven remarkably prophetic and that are helping legal professionals conceptualize and approach the problems of today.…”

“…For more than a decade, the CLS movement engaged in important fights over the precise values that movement members wanted to see entrenched in the law. For more information on this subject, see(Baumgardner 2021;Kelman 1987). …”

“…The legal consciousness of a society is the way in which that society integrates understanding of legal order with other ideas which give meaning to its social world. Taken most broadly, legal consciousness includes all the ideas about the nature, function, and operation of law held by anyone in society at a given time"(Trubek 1984, p. 592).4 For more information about these concerns over conservatization, see(Kelman 1983;Horwitz 1980;Schlegel 1997;Baumgardner 2019Baumgardner , 2021.…”