Unfreezing Legal Reality: Critical Approaches to Law

Critical Legal Studies continues to flourish despite persistent criticism concerning its goals and aims. In the lecture reproduced below, Professor Gordon demonstrates why such global criticism is not only harmless but irrelevant to the central message of the movement. Borrowing from the growing body of CLS scholarship, he illustrates, through example, that the most valuable contributions of CLS are essentially local in nature. But these predominantly local critiques, he explains, can be readily extended to new areas in order to destory [sic] the seemingly necessary connection the seemingly necessary connection between the way our law is and the way it must be.