Books, Arts & Manners: Well-Plowed Fields

A Guide to Critical Legal Studies, by Mark Kelman (Harvard, 360 pp., $30)

Critical Legal Studies, the trendy New Left school of jurisprudence, is probably best known for the role some of its members played in the recent faculty spat at Harvard Law School. The actual substance of CLS theory, though, has remained rather hazy, hidden beneath bad-boy posturing and cloaked in insider jargon. Now Mark Kelman, a “Crit” professor at Stanford Law School, has provided a general overview of CLS scholarship. A Guide to Critical Legal Studies is a dry and often tedious book, but it does capture the main thrusts of the CLS challenge.

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William B. Lindsey

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A Guide to Critical Legal Studies, by Mark Kelman (Harvard, 360 pp., $30)

Critical Legal Studies, the trendy New Left school of jurisprudence, is probably best known for the role some of its members played in the recent faculty spat at Harvard Law School. The actual substance of CLS theory, though, has remained rather hazy, hidden beneath bad-boy posturing and cloaked in insider jargon. Now Mark Kelman, a “Crit” professor at Stanford Law School, has provided a general overview of CLS scholarship. A Guide to Critical Legal Studies is a dry and often tedious book, but it does capture the main thrusts of the CLS challenge.