Introduction to Critical Legal Theory provides an accessible introduction to the study of law and legal theory. It covers all the seminal movements in classical, modern and postmodern legal thought, engaging the reader with the ideas of jurists as diverse as Aristotle, Hobbes and Kant, Marx, Foucault and Dworkin. At the same time, it impresses the interdisciplinary nature of critical legal thought, introducing the reader to the philosophy, the economics and the politics of law. This new edition focuses even more intently upon the narrative aspect of critical legal thinking and the re-emergence of a distinctive legal humanism, as well as the various related challenges posed by our 'new' world order. Introduction to Critical Theory is a comprehensive text for both students and teachers of legal theory, jurisprudence and related subjects.

Much writing in critical legal studies has been devoted to laying bare the contradictions in liberal thought. There have been attacks and counterattacks on the liberal position and on the more conservative law and economics position. Kelman demonstrates that any critique of law and economics is inextricably tied to a broader critique of liberalism.

Raymond Wacks reveals the intriguing and challenging nature of legal philosophy, exploring the notion of law and its role in our lives. He refers to key thinkers from Aristotle to Rawls, from Bentham to Derrida and looks at the central questions behind legal theory, and law's relation to justice, morality, and democracy.

Critical legal studies is the most important development in progressive thinking about law of the past half century. It has inspired the practice of legal analysis as institutional imagination, exploring, with the materials of the law, alternatives for society. The Critical Legal Studies Movement was written as the manifesto of the movement by its central figure. This new edition includes a revised version of the original text, preceded by an extended essay in which its author discusses what is happening now and what should happen next in legal thought.

Contemporary legal thought has been powerfully influenced by Critical Legal Studies, a school of legal scholars whose work has sustained a continuing radical critique of established legal doctrines. In this essential reference work, Richard Bauman presents the most thorough, up-to-date guide available for this essential literature. In addition to providing the basic bibliographic information, Bauman offers a set of effective introductions to contextualize and explain the work being surveyed. He has created a fundamental handbook not only for the law but also for politics and radical thought.

This is a unique guide to one of the most exciting develpments within contemporary jurisprudence. It systematically applies a critical philosophy to the substance of common law, overviewing its politics and cultural significance.

Normative Jurisprudence aims to reinvigorate normative legal scholarship that both criticizes positive law and suggests reforms for it, on the basis of stated moral values and legalistic ideals. It looks sequentially and in detail at the three major traditions in jurisprudence – natural law, legal positivism and critical legal studies – that have in the past provided philosophical foundations for just such normative scholarship. Over the last fifty years or so, all of these traditions, although for different reasons, have taken a number of different turns – toward empirical analysis, conceptual analysis or Foucaultian critique – and away from straightforward normative criticism. As a result, normative legal scholarship – scholarship that is aimed at criticism and reform – is now lacking a foundation in jurisprudential thought. The book criticizes those developments and suggests a return, albeit with different and in many ways larger challenges, to this traditional understanding of the purpose of legal scholarship.