A Counter-Culture of Law: Jurisprudential Change and the Intellectual Origins of the Critical Legal Studies Movement

Critical Legal Studies Movement (CLS) was a critical jurisprudential movement that developed during the 1970s, and came into being in 1977 when the first conference on critical legal studies was held. This article traces the intellectual origins of CLS, providing a comprehensive analysis on its history. The movement was, this article argues, a radical extension of the changes that had occurred in legal scholarship during the 1960s and early 1970s. Moreover, it was a result of a complex mixture of intellectual, scholarly, and political aspects, and it should not be reduced into any one of them.