[1] CLS adherents claim that laws are devised to maintain the status quo of society and thereby codify its biases against marginalized groups.
[clarification needed] Members such as Roberto Mangabeira Unger have sought to rebuild these institutions as "fragmentary and imperfect expressions of an imaginative scheme of human coexistence rather than just as provisional truce lines in a brutal and amoral conflict.
Drawing on both domestic theory and the work of European social theorists, the "crits" sought to demystify what they saw as the numerous myths at the heart of mainstream legal thought and practice.
The "crits" include Duncan Kennedy, Roberto Unger, Morton Horwitz, Mark Kelman, and Catharine MacKinnon.
[13] The British critical legal studies movement started roughly at a similar time as its American counterpart.
[15] In France, where the legal tradition had been closely guarded by law faculties and watched over by Napoleonic institutions such as the Court of Cassation, the Conseil d'Etat, and the Ecole Nationale de la Magistrature, famed sociologist Pierre Bourdieu caused an uproar when he released his "La Force de la loi, élements pour une sociologie du champ juridique" in 1986 - translated as "The Force of Law: Toward a Sociology of the Juridical Field", in the Hastings Law Journal (1987).
[6] A 2011 collection of four volumes edited by Costas Douzinas and Colin Perrin, with the assistance of J-M Barreto, compiles the work of the British Critical Legal Studies, including their philosophical mentors.
It showcases scholarship elaborated since its origins in the late 1980s in areas such as legal philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, feminism, gender, sexuality, post-colonialism, race, ethics, politics and human rights.
[20] Prominent participants in the CLS movement include Derrick Bell, Drucilla Cornell, Mary Joe Frug, Mark Kelman, Alan Hunt, Catharine MacKinnon, Paul O'Connell, Peter Fitzpatrick, Morton Horwitz, Jack Balkin, Costas Douzinas, Karl Klare, Peter Gabel, Roberto Unger, Renata Salecl, Mark Tushnet, Louis Michael Seidman, John Strawson and Martha Fineman.
[23] Under the practice of reasoned elaboration, this inherent legal substance forms a prescriptive system that judges gradually uncover by reasoning through the policies and principles of law without questioning the "basic institutional arrangements of the market economy, of democratic politics, and of civil society outside the market and the state".
[25] In addition to the context of legal interpretation, critical legal studies also emerged in response to its political context, namely a setting in which the social-democratic settlement that was finalized after World War II had become canonical,[26] and active dispute over the organization of society severely declined, effectively enshrining a reigning consensus about social organization that Unger describes as including a "combination of neoliberal orthodoxy, state capitalism, and compensatory redistribution by tax and transfer.
In accordance with the Critical rationalism the German jurist Reinhold Zippelius uses Popper's method of "trial and error" in his 'Legal Philosophy'.
[28] Although the CLS (like most schools and movements) has not produced a single, monolithic body of thought, several common themes can be generally traced in its adherents' works.
[31] Further information on the title subject, presented in inverse order of date of publication, and alphabetical by author, within year: