In the United States of America, as in France, there was a current of thought strongly critical of liberal law emerging during the 1970s. The French version of the “Critique du Droit” was a Marxist challenge to the unequal effects of law in society. The American version, known as Critical Legal Studies or “CLS,” was as much a condemnation of the regressive effects of law as an internal critique of the incoherence of its discursive constructions. The two intellectual currents, in France and in the United States, emerged around the same time, despite the absence of communication from their authors on both sides of the Atlantic. In this short text, I mainly deal with the CLS, but there were other critical movements during the same period, such as the Law and Society whose main followers, present in Wisconsin, criticized the centrality of positive law in the analyzes to the detriment of taking into account social norms and practices, or Law and Economics, particularly in Chicago, which criticized the inaccuracy of the interpretation of common law and legislation, this movement therefore promoting an economic logic in the creation of legal rules. Due to space constraints, the focus here is therefore exclusively on the CLS.
My goal in this short story is to present some aspects of this thinking in the United States. It’s a heavy task to accomplish in a small space…
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