The Impact of Critical Legal Studies (CLS) on the Evolution of the Theoretical Reflections of Legal Scholarship

The historical foundations of CLS were founded as a result of the failure of the mainstream legal scholarship at the end of the Victorian era’s optimism which was simultaneous to the beginning of the First World War. One of the characteristics of CLS, which to some extent was created as a result of the development of legal realism in the USA, is to open legal jurisprudence to the other disciplines and to reject the thought that CLS is merely a philosophical discussion of the concept of law. CLS, firstly, throws a shadow of doubt about the attitude of the mainstream legal scholarship premised upon the belief that law is perfect, autonomous, and logical. In ultimately rejecting this belief, CLS shows that the so-called triumphs of the conventional legal mainstream are ambiguous. By acknowledging the risk of scepticism and by advancing its ideals according to this, CLS has provided conditions, and therefore means, for the social world to continuously reconsider itself.