| 释义 |
critical legal studies
(CLS) A radical approach to jurisprudence that developed in the USA in the 1970s. It expresses a broadly Marxist critique of the substantive doctrines of the law (see Marxist legal theory), but draws on philosophy, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and semiotics as well as politics and economics. In its early stages, CLS was distinctive in two respects: first, it was located within legal scholarship rather than sociology or political science; secondly, it sought to address the inequities of legal doctrine. Although often described as a successor of legal realism, its view of the notion of the indeterminacy of law is in fact much more radical. Whereas the US realists regarded indeterminacy as being confined to a certain class of cases, CLS theorists contend that law is radically indeterminate in the sense that the class of available legal materials rarely, if ever, logically or causally entails a unique outcome. It rejects conventional liberal conceptions of law that draw a fundamental distinction between law-making by the legislature, on the one hand, and interpretation of the law by the judiciary, on the other. Since CLS regards the law as indeterminate, judges are perceived as typically deciding cases by making new law, a view inconsistent with liberal ideology. |