The critical legal studies movement /

Although the author teaches law at Harvard, he is widely regarded as an important thinker in political theory, philosophy, and religion. His Knowledge and Politics (CH, Mar '76) presented a critique of both liberal and Marxist political theory. This book is more narrowly addressed to legal philosophy, but displays Unger's catholic abilities. The critical legal studies movement arose from the neo-Marxist attack on liberal jurisprudence's formalism and objectivism; it insists that law does not represent absolute, apolitical truth, but specific economic institutions and class interests. Unger adopts what he sees as the constructive quality of this school, while retaining what is valuable in traditional legal philosophy. His alternative to both (which he calls ``Deviationist doctrine'') synthesizes the two by infusing the substance of the former into the categories of the latter. Unger wishes law to be enlivened by normative political theory. Legal concepts (e.g., ``contract,'' ``equal protection,'' ``freedom'') should be debated and redefined rather than merely asserted as abstract rights. This ``enlarged doctrine extends into legal thought a social program committed to moderate the contrast between routinized social life and its occasional revolutionary re-creation'' (p. 21-22). This extends to economics and democracy in a way reminiscent of Benjamin Barber's Strong Democracy (CH, Dec '84).-G.W. Sheldon, Clinch Valley College of the University of Virginia