Law on the Left: a Conversation with Duncan Kennedy (original) (raw)

Critical Jurisprudence of Duncan Kennedy and the Status of the Theory of Legal Interpretation

Krytyka Prawa. Niezależne studia nad prawem, 2020

The article attempts to analyse the status of the theory of legal interpretation that emerges from the contributions of one of the representatives of critical legal studies (CLS). Legal interpretation is analysed by using concepts drawn from hermeneutic universalism and the post-structural philosophy of politics. The concepts of Duncan Kennedy, an American philosopher of law, are subjected to analysis, and his concept of adjudication, the indeterminacy thesis and the hermeneutic of suspicion is addressed. The paper puts forward the thesis that the political nature of law-alongside factors closely related to social structure-is also determined by factors which pertain to the cognitive subject. This fact has crucial importance for determining the status of the theory of legal interpretation.

Primer on Left Legal Theory: Realism, Marxism, CLS & PoMo, A

2010

Works of political fiction can and do reflect social problems by highlighting abuses in society. Franz Kafka's novel, The Trial, demonstrates how the societal role of a legal system can be interpreted in a multitude of ways.'In this manner, Kafka's work influences our attitudes and beliefs. This paper examines the concepts of authority and personal well-being as depicted in Kafka's literary work. In short, Kafka's fictional characters consent to legal and familial authority in order to achieve some form of personal familial satisfaction.

Critical Legal Studies: The Death of Transcendence and the Rise of the New Langdells

New York University Law Review, 1987

Critical legal scholars' claims that law is ideological and indeterminate have provoked criticism from many sources. Arguing that earlier criticisms of Critical Legal Studies (CLS) have not understood its significance as reflecting major currents of twentiethcentury thought, Professor Williams puts forward her own critique of CLS. She traces a broad range of developments in fields as disparate as physics, anthropology, philosophy, and art, and shows how each field reflects a new epistemology that rejects traditional certainties and objective truths. CLS's significant contribution is that it seeks to incorporate the new epistemology into law. Yet, Professor Williams criticizes major themes in CLS as inconsistent with the new epistemology, arguing first that CLS's structuralist analysis of law assumes that CLS has access to objective, fundamental truths. Professor Williams also challenges CLS claims that law is ideological and indeterminate. Drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy, Professor Williams maintains that, despite the lack of an absolute, objective meaning, language fixes meaning sufficiently that legal doctrine provides a framework for a particular kind of political discourse. In the absence of absolutes, she concludes, the new epistemology teaches us that we must take responsibility for the ethical choices embodied in it.

Research Handbook on Law and Marxism (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2021)

Cosmin Sebastian Cercel, Gustavo Capela, Umut Özsu, Pablo Ciocchini, Igor Shoikhedbrod, Stefanie Khoury, Bill Bowring, Rene Keller, Nimer Sultany, Dimitrios Kivotidis, Max Ajl

Research Handbook on Law and Marxism, 2021

The first edition of this Research Handbook offers unparalleled insights into the large-scale resurgence of interest in Marx and Marxism in recent years, with contributions devoted specifically to Marxist critiques of law, rights, and the state. The Research Handbook brings together thirty-three scholars of Marx, Marxism, and law from around the world to offer theoretically informed introductions to the Marxist tradition of social critique, contemporary Marxist analyses of law and rights, and future orientations of Marxist legal analysis. Chapters testify to the strength of Marxist critical tools for understanding the role of law, rights, and the state in capitalist societies. Exploring Marxist critique across an extraordinarily wide range of scholarly disciplines, this Research Handbook is a must-read for scholars of law, politics, sociology, philosophy, and political economy who are interested in Marxism. Graduate and advanced undergraduate students in these and related disciplines will also benefit from the Research Handbook. The volume is edited by Paul O'Connell (Reader in Law, SOAS, University of London) and Umut Özsu (Associate Professor of Law and Legal Studies, Carleton University). Contributors include Max Ajl (Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Social Sciences, Rural Sociology Group, Wageningen University & Research), Rémi Bachand (Professor of Law, Université du Québec à Montréal), Miriam Bak McKenna (Lecturer in Law, Lund University), Clyde W. Barrow (Professor of Political Science, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley), Enzo Bello (Associate Professor, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Rio de Janeiro), Bill Bowring (Professor of Law, Birkbeck, University of London), Honor Brabazon (Assistant Professor of Sociology and Legal Studies, St. Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo), Gustavo Capela (PhD Candidate in Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley), Cosmin Sebastian Cercel (Associate Professor of Law, University of Nottingham), B. S. Chimni (Distinguished Professor of International Law, OP Jindal Global University), Pablo Ciocchini (Lecturer in Criminology, University of Liverpool), Natalia Delgado (Lecturer in Law, University of Southampton), Matthew Dimick (Professor of Law, University of Buffalo), Radha D’Souza (Reader in Law, University of Westminster), Michael Head (Professor of Law, Western Sydney University), Nate Holdren (Associate Professor of Law, Politics, and Society, Drake University), Rob Hunter (Independent Scholar, PhD in Politics, Princeton University), Talina Hürzeler (Independent Scholar, LLB, University of New South Wales), Bob Jessop (Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Lancaster), Rene José Keller (Independent Scholar, PhD in Law, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, and PhD in Social Work, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul), Rafael Khachaturian (Lecturer in Critical Writing, University of Pennsylvania), Stéfanie Khoury (Independent Scholar, PhD in Sociology of Law, Università degli Studi di Milano and Universidad del País Vasco), Dimitrios Kivotidis (Lecturer in Law, University of East London), Daniel McLoughlin (Senior Lecturer in Law, Society, and Criminology, University of New South Wales), Eva Nanopoulos (Senior Lecturer in Law, Queen Mary, University of London), August H. Nimtz (Professor of Political Science and African American and African Studies, University of Minnesota), Paul O’Connell (Reader in Law, SOAS, University of London), Chris O’Kane (Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley), Rebecca Schein (Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Carleton University), Igor Shoikhedbrod (Assistant Professor of Political Science and Law, Justice, and Society, Dalhousie University), Nimer Sultany (Reader in Law, SOAS, University of London), Christine Sypnowich (Professor of Philosophy, Queen’s University), and Ahmed White (Professor of Law, University of Colorado at Boulder).

Law as Politics: Reflections on the Critical Legal Studies Movement

SCLS Law Review Vol 1 No 2, 2018

Critical Legal Studies (hereinafter CLS) movement of the U.S. marked the combination of a legal way of thought and a social network of left leaning legal scholars of 1970s. Though loosely constructed as a legal theory, CLS lacks the ingredients necessary for a full pledged legal theory. It is rather better described as anetwork of like-minded legal scholars at Harvard and a way of legal thought.1 Prominent among the scholars were Roberto Unger,Duncan Kennedy, David Kennedy, Morton Horwitz, Jack Balkin, Mark Tushnet and Louis Michael Seidman. As is put by Roberto Unger, though CLS was meant to be “continued as an organizing force only until the late 1980s,…its founders never meant it to become an ongoing school of thought or genre of writing.” Yet the movement became a very powerful school of thought popularised throughout America and the rest of the world. CLS has been perceived both as a reaction to legal Formalism and Realism and a distinct theory of law.

Introduction Legal Critique in the Age of Neoliberalism

Griffith Law Review, 2018

The papers gathered in this special issue began their lives as plenary presentations at the 2016 UK Critical Legal Conference, hosted at Kent Law School by the editors of the special issue and a committee of Kent Law School colleagues. This conference was arguably the 30th anniversary of the first CLC, also held at Kent, in 1986. The theme of the 2016 conference, 'Turning Points', was designed to provoke and accommodate a plurality of critical (legal) reflections on the specificity of the contemporary political situation. If the conference theme may now seem slightly prescienthaving been decided well before June's Brexit referendum and November's US presidential electionit is worth remembering that an air of change, upheaval and crisis already prevailed. The European migrant crisis was at its peak. 1 The worsening impacts of the Global Financial Crisis and Eurozone Crisis continued to be felt. Debt, social and economic precarity, polarised public discourse and the transformative effects of new technologies were already inescapable facts. Being located in Kent, at 'the UK's European University', the 'centrality' of Europe and its legal, political and intellectual traditionsand their constitutive relations with their 'others'were already at the front of our minds. Far from being prescient, the conference committee was as surprised as anyone by the results of that year's fateful ballots, and the 'turning points' they will forever be taken to mark. If anything, the coincidence of conference theme and political events speaks less to the latter's novelty, and more to the continuities that they made visible: deeper questions about the political and cultural imaginaries of both the UK and USA as nations (or empires). Their familiar clusters of social, economic, political and legal problems (immigration, (ethno)nationalism, and sovereignty, to name just one) were perhaps merely given new faces in the form of post-2016 populisms, echoes of fascism, and the effects of new media technologies. For critical legal scholarly traditions, these recent events have offered new spurs to consider the interaction of legality and legal rules with the operation of political, governmental and economic power. The nature of that interaction has always been a matter of fundamental significance for the liberal legal project, as well as its criticsfrom the earliest Marxist approaches, right through to today's cresting (or breaking?) neoliberal wave. Our interest was not at all in determining the new truth of the relation between law and the political, but rather in reflecting on how the present moment affects the pursuit of something like a critical legal project. Contemporary conditions are never separable from the critical impulse and the shape of its enterprise: in each moment, they provoke it, and give it its object, whilst also conditioning and constraining it, and suggesting the