Despite the putative association with American CLS, Costas Douzinas, who has been closely involved with the British CLC from its outset, has argued that their ethos are very different.
American CLS was intellectually focused on the "critique of the judicial institutions and reasoning" while its politics "were largely exhausted in the intrigue of the academy and the endless search for media exposure".
Every September the place for the next conference is decided and people bid their good-byes for another year, leaving it to the next organiser to put together the programme.
Western Marxism, postmodernism and deconstruction were the main theoretical influences of the early conferences but soon the new radicalism of race, gender, queer and post-colonial theory were introduced in the legal academy through the CLC.
Indeed these conferences were the only academic venues in which such themes were discussed for many years before they became respectable and entered, albeit marginally, mainstream academia.