Word: cls
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...attention has focused on the "academic feud" between conservative and radical faculty members that has shaken the foundations of the Law School. Cited as the cause of the battle are the self-styled "unholy triumvirate" of professors Duncan Kennedy, Morton Horwitz, and Roberto Unger, and the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) movement they helped start...
What is downplayed in this fetishizing of Harvard Law School, however, is that CLS extends far beyond the arena of veri-turf squabbles. It is a national movement among the legal intelligentsia, drawing over a thousand participants to its annual conference...
...CLS is trying to show that academic feuds are not just intellectual bickering, but rather are battles against power structures that perpetuate inequalities and injustices in the social order. These are battles to politicize legal education, to inject debate about illegitimate hierarchy and oppression, about minorities and women and their relation to the law, into the calm logic of legal analysis--in more concrete terms, to get a Black professor onto the Law School faculty...
...CLS does not stop at the law school gates. It is a new radical social vision informed by critical approaches running the gamut from Gramsci to Derrida. Gone are the criteria of "scholarly excellence" and "intellectual integrity," the bywords of the conservatives under attack. In their place is a conviction that the law can never be apolitical, whether in courtrooms or classrooms...
...CLS politicizing the law does not mean adding new radical elements, but rather drawing out into the open what is already there. Conservatives charge that the CLS faction of the Law School faculty has "manipulated" the tenure process to hire more left faculty members. But how can anybody claim that CLS proponents have perverted something for which there is no objective norm, something that is already a debate and a political process? The reasonableness of the tenure process--likewise of the "science" of legal analysis which presumes to logically deduce the one right answer to legal questions--only enshrines existing...