On September 17, 2020, Donald Trump spoke at the so-called “White House Conference on American History.”[1] The conference mission, Trump explained, was to “clear away the twisted web of lies” …
Read more “Introduction to the Symposium: The Stakes for Critical Legal Theory”
On the first day of the first-year contracts class that I teach, I preview for the students both the general contours of the “blackletter law”[1] that we will be learning …
Read more “Reloading the Canon: Thoughts on Critical Legal Pedagogy”
The critique of rights has played a crowning role in critical philosophy. From Hegel to Marx, to Foucault and beyond—Duncan Kennedy, Christoph Menke, the contributors to this Symposium—the critique of …
Star date 2/7/2020. Author’s log. I received an email from our Co-Editor, the double barrels of Desautels-Stein, relating to the now-virtual symposium, What Should Critical Legal Theory Become?[1] The electronic …
Read more “The Pure Theory of Law is a Hole in the Ozone Layer”
Perhaps it is appropriate that critical legal theory—a genre of thought fascinated with contradictions and dedicated to unsettling orthodoxies—is itself in a contradictory and unsettled state today. Some of the …
An art of speaking which does not seize hold of truth, does not exist and never will. –Phaedrus (260e) I feel I have slipped into this Symposium Issue to address …
Critique is the standard model of legal scholarship. The typical article or book circumscribes an aspect of the legal order, redescribes it as policy, criticizes the policy according to efficiency …
Read more “Critical Legal Thought: The Case for a Jurisprudence of Distribution”
The Critical Legal Studies movement and the emerging Law and Political Economy Project both emphasize the way that legal rules and doctrines help both to constitute and to legitimize an …
As I write these words, the East Coast of New South Wales (the most populous State in Australia) is being assailed with torrential rain that is likely to last for …
Read more “From the Crisis of Critique to the Critique of Crisis”
Good people say that we must not flee, that to escape is not good, that it isn’t effective, and that one must work for reforms. But the revolutionary knows that …
Read more “Making the Critical Moves: A Top Ten in Progressive Legal Scholarship”