- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804756594
- eISBN:
- 9780804787529
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804756594.003.0001
- Subject:
- Law, Philosophy of Law
This book is a study of two twentieth-century schools of American legal theory and their relationship—legal realism and critical legal studies (CLS). This chapter provides a brief history of the ...
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This book is a study of two twentieth-century schools of American legal theory and their relationship—legal realism and critical legal studies (CLS). This chapter provides a brief history of the legal realist movement, its emergence as a distinct movement in the 1920s and 1930s and how it formed the inspiration for the critical legal studies movement from the 1970s onward. It presents the central premise of the study: legal realism and CLS are not continuous bodies of thought. Finally, the chapter identifies three issues that help clarify this central premise of the study: historicism, social science and linguistic theory.Less
This book is a study of two twentieth-century schools of American legal theory and their relationship—legal realism and critical legal studies (CLS). This chapter provides a brief history of the legal realist movement, its emergence as a distinct movement in the 1920s and 1930s and how it formed the inspiration for the critical legal studies movement from the 1970s onward. It presents the central premise of the study: legal realism and CLS are not continuous bodies of thought. Finally, the chapter identifies three issues that help clarify this central premise of the study: historicism, social science and linguistic theory.
