Critical Legal Studies and the Critique of Legal Objectivity

Critical Legal Studies (CLS) emerged as an organized academic movement in the United States from a founding conference at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1977, gathering law professors dissatisfied with both mainstream doctrinal legal scholarship and, on the left, with what they saw as liberal legalism's excessive faith in law's neutrality and determinacy. Its most prominent early figures included Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Duncan Kennedy, and Morton Horwitz at Harvard Law School, where CLS found its most visible institutional home and where internal disputes over the movement's implications for hiring and tenure produced the so-called "Harvard Law School wars" of the 1980s, chronicled in accounts such as those collected in the journal published by the Conference on Critical Legal Studies.