The Rise and Fall of Critical Legal Studies

Law, Politics, Culture

Author: James Gilchrist Stewart

The Rise and Fall of Critical Legal Studies

Paperback

A wide-ranging intellectual history of the life, death, and afterlife of the Critical Legal Studies Movement.

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11th May 2026

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Summary

A wide-ranging intellectual history of the life, death, and afterlife of the Critical Legal Studies Movement.

Description

A wide-ranging intellectual history of the Critical Legal Studies Movement, drawing from personal accounts, academic works, and the media. The Rise and Fall of Critical Legal Studies unpacks Critical Legal Studies (CLS) to address what CLS was, how it came about, and what its legacy means for contemporary legal theories.
Taking a CLS approach to CLS, a range of legal, literary, filmic, and philosophical lenses are applied 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 to see what it achieved.

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 also limited.