Friends, allow me to introduce you to a legal scholar you might otherwise be unfamiliar with named Mark Tushnet, professor emeritus of law at Harvard University. Tushnet is notable as one of the leading lights of the critical legal studies movement (CLS), most known for spawning the sub-field of critical race theory. (So don’t worry — it’s just an obscure academic theory, not the sort of thing that insinuated its way into your child’s educational formation over a decade ago while you weren’t paying attention.) Like a bad penny or a Babadook haunting legal conservatives, he just keeps turning up at the most fittingly ominous moments, telegraphing what will next be coming down the pike from the Left.
If you’re familiar with critical race theory — one assumes that readers of National Review have encountered the term at least a few times — then you already understand the basic intellectual approach underpinning CLS: namely, that laws are imposed by society’s economic and racial winners to encode their privilege (the now-ubiquitous term “white privilege” emerged from this academic milieu) and are thus owed zero judicial deference if they are deemed to “uphold oppression” by the sorts of intellectuals and activists who call the tune of the times.
Comments