Critical legal studies

Critical legal studies is a movement in legal scholarship that examines how law reflects and reinforces power relations and challenges claims that legal reasoning is neutral.

Legal indeterminacy: The idea that legal materials can support multiple plausible outcomes in contested cases. Indeterminacy challenges the claim that legal rules mechanically determine results.
American legal realism: A twentieth-century movement that examined how judicial decisions are shaped by facts, institutions, and social forces. It supplied an earlier critique of mechanical legal reasoning.
Peter Gabel: An American legal scholar whose work connected critical legal studies with social alienation and community. His approach emphasized the emotional and relational dimensions of legal authority.
Law and economics: An approach that applies economic concepts, especially efficiency, to analyze legal rules and institutions. Critical legal scholars challenge its assumptions about markets, rationality, and distribution.
Critical race theory: A movement in legal scholarship examining how law and institutions produce and maintain racial hierarchy. It developed partly from critical legal studies while centering race and racism.
Rule-skepticism: A jurisprudential view that legal rules alone cannot reliably predict judicial decisions. It shows how judges can select among competing rules and interpretations.
Conference on Critical Legal Studies: A series of gatherings in the 1970s that helped organize critical legal scholars in the United States. The conference gave the movement its name and an institutional network.
Morton Horwitz: An American legal historian known for studying the relationship between law and economic power. His historical work traced how legal doctrine shifted with social and economic interests.
Natural law: A tradition holding that law is connected to moral principles discoverable through reason or human nature. Its appeal to objective legal standards conflicts with the movement’s critique of neutrality.
Feminist legal theory: The study of how law shapes and is shaped by gender relations and feminist movements. Feminist scholars challenged the movement to account more fully for gendered power.

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