In France, where the legal tradition was closely guarded by law faculties and supervised by Napoleonic institutions such as the Court of Cassation, the Council of State and the National School of Magistracy, the famous sociologist Pierre Bourdieu caused an uproar by publishing in 1986 his book “La Force De La Loi, Elements Pour Une Sociologie du Champ Juridique” – translated as “The Power of Law: Towards a Sociology of the Juridical Field”, in the Hastings Law Journal (1987). He announced the beginning of critical continental legal studies. CLS continues to be a diverse collection of schools of thought and social movements. The CLS community is an extremely broad group with groups of critical theorists in law schools and departments of social law studies such as Harvard Law School, Georgetown University Law Center, Northeastern University, University at Buffalo, Chicago-Kent College of Law, Birkbeck, University of London, University of Melbourne, University of Kent, Carleton University, Keele University, the University of Glasgow, including the University of East London. The influence of legal realism has shaken American jurisprudence for decades. Alan Hunt writes that the period “between the realism of the 1930s and the emergence of critical legal studies in the late 1970s was a series of unsuccessful attempts to find from the shock of realism a basis for a legal theory that articulates a picture of the objectivity of the legal process, although the explanation offered by post-realism must have been more complex than that, which provided a doctrine of compliance with the rules.” [1] Although the CLS (like most schools and movements) did not produce a single monolithic current of thought, several common themes can generally be understood in the work of its followers. These include: Critical Legal Studies (CLS) is a school of critical theory that developed in the United States in the 1970s. [1] CLS supporters argue that the laws were designed to maintain society`s status quo, codifying its prejudices against marginalized groups. [2] Despite the great differences of opinion of critical jurists around the world, there is a general consensus[3] on the main objectives of critical legal studies: in accordance with their position on the political left, CLS researchers have a common dissatisfaction with the established legal and political order, and in particular liberalism, which they consider to be the dominant political ideology. CLS shows how liberalism describes the world according to categories that exist as dualities: subjective-objective, man-woman, public-private, others, individual-community, etc. These dualities are sometimes referred to by CLS theorists as paired opposites. CLS then breaks down the dualities and shows how they create an ideology that promotes the interests of the ruling class.

CLS theorists also condemn the individualism that liberal society promotes, and they call for a renewed focus on communal rather than individual values. In particular, they oppose capitalism as an economic system, and they regard liberalism as the greatest apologist for capitalism. Critical legal studies have their intellectual origins in the American legal realism movement in the 1930s. Prior to the 1930s, American jurisprudence had been dominated by a formalistic account of court decisions, a narrative that stated that judges decided cases on the basis of clear legal rules and reasons that justified a single outcome. Legal realists have argued that the law and jurisprudence are vague and that courts of appeal decide cases not on the basis of the law, but on the basis of what they consider to be fair in light of the facts of a case. American legal realism, considered “the most important jurisprudential movement of the 20th century”[12], caused a shock in American jurisprudence by undermining formalistic principles that had long been considered the foundation of jurisprudence. [Citation needed] Such innovations would require significant legislative changes, particularly with regard to the understanding of rights, including property rights. In his call for a radical restructuring of rights, Unger proposes to create four categories: immunity rights that protect individuals from the state, organizations and other individuals; destabilizing rights that dismantle the institutions and practices that create social hierarchy and division; market rights, which constitute claims to share capital and replace traditional property rights; and solidarity rights, which are “the legal rights of community life”. Despite his critique of liberalism, Unger calls his philosophy “superliberalism”: increasingly, however, traditional issues are being replaced by broader, more radical critical ideas. Interference with intellectual property law, human rights, jurisprudence, criminal law, property law, international law, etc. proved crucial for the development of these discourses. CLS also introduced new frameworks for the legal field, such as postmodernism, queer theory, literary approaches to law, psychoanalysis, law and aesthetics, and postcolonialism.

Roberto Unger, a key member of critical jurisprudence whose influence continued to be far-reaching in the decades following the movement`s decline, wrote that the founders of critical jurisprudence “never intended it to become a school of continuous thought or a genre of writing. They wanted to intervene in certain circumstances. [13] The critical jurisprudence movement emerged in the mid-1970s as a network of left-wing law professors in the United States who developed the realist thesis of indeterminacy in the service of left-wing ideals. According to Roberto Unger, the movement “only existed until the late 1980s as an organizing force. Their life as a movement lasted just over a decade. [13] MacKinnon also uses rape as an example of how the conventional liberal distinction between the public and private spheres actually reinforces male power. For women, MacKinnon said, privacy cannot be separated from the public. The private sphere as it is generally understood – i.e. the home – is actually a place where the law defines the right of men to dominate women through domestic violence, marital rape and abusive working conditions. The law, MacKinnon said, neglects such injustices, and legal doctrines regarding privacy at home perpetuate rather than resolve them. Many CRT authors use unconventional narrative methods – sometimes referred to as legal storytelling – in their legal writing, including fiction, myth, parable, anecdote, and autobiography. These approaches often show how the mindset of the majority (in this case, the perspective of the white majority, including its prejudices and assumptions) hinders the cause of racial reform.

Bell, for example, published a science fiction story in a legal journal with implications for race relations in the United States. In it, an alien race comes to Earth and offers to solve the economic and environmental problems of the United States in exchange for the possession of all the black United States.