A Definition of Critical Legal Studies

Pierre Schlag, University of Colorado Law School, has published Critical Legal Studies, in 295 The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History (Stanley N. Katz ed., 2009). Here is the abstract.

This brief encyclopedia entry, written for the Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History, discusses the origins and implications of critical legal studies as a political movement and an intellectual tendency. The entry attempts to chart the intellectual forerunners, the intellectual contributions, the politics, and the legacies of critical legal studies. It also describes the attacks on cls and the anti-intellectual consequences of these attacks for the American legal academy.

Download the entry from SSRN at the link.

The Origins Of Critical Race Theory

Richard Delgado, Seattle University School of Law, has published "Liberal McCarthyism and the Origins of Critical Race Theory," at 94 Iowa Law Review 1505 (2009). Here is the abstract.

I wrote this piece exploring some of the intellectual origins of critical race theory for a 20-year anniversary of the movement held at the University of Iowa in April, 2009. In it, I look at the role of certain prominent university officers in purging their ranks of white radicals to prepare the way, in the late sixties and early seventies, for the first large group of post-Brown minority students who were starting to arrive around that time. I show how four promising white professors, two of law, one of history, and one of criminology lost their jobs and what they did afterward. I show that they continued to teach and write about left-wing thought in the hinterlands in ways that contributed to the rise of critical race theory. As they say, it is hard to kill an idea.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Conference Announcement

The Critical Legal Conference

From Bald de Vries and Since 1984, every first weekend in September, the Critical Legal Conference brings together critical and radical legal scholars from all over the world. It has been a phenomenal success despite its modesty. The CLC is also exactly that: a conference. No organisation, presidents and secretaries, members and subscrip­tions.
This conference is a transient community; an inoperative community always to come, lasting for three days every year, without orthodoxies, exclu­sions or stars and gets down to the business of thinking and being together. In doing so, a variety of critical schools, such as postmodernism, phenomenology, decon­struction, feminism, post-colonialism, critical race, queer theory, the ethics of otherness, the ontology of plural singularity, and the critique of bio-politics have been pioneered in these conferences, creating new and stronger links between theory and practice.
Most conferences have taken place in the UK but we have also been to South Africa, India, Ireland and Scandinavia. This is the first time, the CLC is organised in the Netherlands. It hopes to bring together different schools and approaches to critical legal scholarship at a time when collaboration and solidarity across Europe and the world is imperative.