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This chapter presents a critical examination of Unger's seminal article and book The Critical Legal Studies Movement, and of its account of legal thought, tested against its account of certain ‘exemplary’ difficulties in the Anglo-American law of contract. Unger's account fundamentally misconstrues the ways of legal thought and hides its misunderstanding behind equivocations on ‘(in)determinate’ and ‘(un)justified’ and neglect of under-determination. Its triadic schemas are too complex and too simple to capture the problems with which any law of contract must grapple. Underlying the Movement is a poverty-stricken conception of the forms of human good and a scepticism resting on unsound arguments. The result is a threat to the vulnerable in society.

This chapter presents an interview with Duncan Kennedy, the Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence at the Harvard Law School. He is best known for helping to found and promote the critical legal studies movement. He helped introduce Continental legal theory to the American legal academy and has contributed to policy analysis in a host of legal areas, frequently utilizing economic analysis, while at the same time being highly critical of the dominant Chicago school law and economics approach. Topics covered during the interview include why Kennedy decided to become a legal academic; his work in the CIA's National Student Association operation; his undergraduate training in development economics at Harvard and the professors who influenced him; how he dealt with the common set of questions facing any beginning professor; and his critique of mainstream American law and economics.

This chapter presents an interview with Morton Horwitz, the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at the Harvard Law School. Professor Horwitz has made major contributions in the field of American legal history. His Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860 (1977) and Transformation of American Law, 1870–1960 (1992) are canonical texts in the field of legal history. Professor Horwitz's major substantive fields are constitutional law and torts. He is also one of the founding figures in the critical legal studies movement. Topics covered during the interview include what is was like being a student at CCNY, now CUNY, in the early Sixties; Horwitz' s law school experience at Harvard; the influences of Martin Luther King and Walter Reuther on him; his career as a legal historian; and the differences between Transformation I and Transformation II.