Abstract
The Critical Legal Studies movement has emerged as the bete noire of contemporary legal scholarship. The response to CLS has been often vitriolic, and too often hysterical (Carrington 1984, Price 1989). Radical pluralism has been perceived as threatening the very foundations of liberal legalism. Yet, as Andrew Altman has emphasised, CLS cannot be singularly determined. The alternative ‘radical’ and ‘moderate’ variants of CLS present very different visions, and the hallmark of the ‘moderate’ variant, as epitomised by such as Unger, is its affinity with a reconstructive liberal counter-critique. Pluralism provides the fuel for liberalism, and as we saw in the previous chapter, the ability of a consensus theory to ameliorate the pluralist critique is an explicit recognition that the Rawlsian thesis complements the Ungerian (Altman 1990).
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1997 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ward, I. (1997). Critical Legal Studies and Beyond. In: Kantianism, Postmodernism and Critical Legal Thought. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 31. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8830-0_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8830-0_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-4911-7
Online ISBN: 978-94-015-8830-0
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive