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Law Legal Education

Ideology and Community in the First Wave of Critical Legal Studies

by (author) Richard Bauman

Publisher
University of Toronto Press
Initial publish date
Dec 2002
Category
Legal Education, Legal History, General
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780802083418
    Publish Date
    Dec 2002
    List Price
    $53.00
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780802048035
    Publish Date
    Dec 2002
    List Price
    $107.00
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781442675964
    Publish Date
    Nov 2002
    List Price
    $105.00

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Description

In Ideology and Community in the First Wave of Critical Legal Studies Richard W. Bauman presents a fresh, rigorous assessment of some of the key ideas developed by writers aligned with the early Critical Legal Studies movement. This book examines several major themes and arguments in the first decade of critical legal scholarship, predominantly in the U.S. in the period dating roughly from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s.

Heterogeneous and progressive, the Critical Legal Studies movement inspired a variety of leftist reexaminations and critiques of dominant liberal assumptions underlying the law and legal institutions. Bauman offers an exposition and assessment of the radical challenge to several central tenets of legal and political liberalism, including the values associated with individualism, moral skepticism, and state neutrality. He maintains that radical critics associated with early critical legal studies misapprehended many of the important assumptions and commitments of contemporary political liberalism and tended to misconstrue liberalism as relying on specific, deficient metaphysical underpinnings. Although the quest therefore, might have failed, the early Critical Legal Studies movement did succeed in sharpening discussions about the politics of law and legal interpretation and in providing a stimulus to other types of radical, contemporary critique.

About the author

Richard W. Bauman is Professor of Law, University of Alberta.

Richard Bauman's profile page