The Rise and Fall of Critical Legal Studies

A wide-ranging intellectual history of the life, death, and afterlife of the Critical Legal Studies Movement. The Rise and Fall of Critical Legal Studies puts Critical Legal Studies (CLS) centre-stage to address what CLS was, how it came about, and what its legacy means for contemporary legal theories. Taking a CLS approach to the discipline itself, Stewart applies a range of legal, literary, filmic, and philosophical lenses to key theorists and their works, with a specific focus on Duncan Kennedy. Through this analysis, a dominant type of CLS is untangled, and in true Crit form, repeatedly questioned from different perspectives. The Rise and Fall of Critical Legal Studies argues that CLS haunts the legal landscape, constricting emerging critiques of law. While the personal hierarchies of the Movement's founders ensured CLS was limited from the outset. James Gilchrist Stewart is a Lecturer in Law at RMIT University