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Critical Approaches to the First Amendment |
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Critical Approaches to the First Amendment |
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The purpose of Critical Legal Studies is "to explore the manner in which legal doctrine and legal education and the practice of legal institutions work to buttress and support a pervasive system of oppresive, egalitarian relations."
From CLS Conference Statement, 1987
Their work was grounded in the assumptions of social constructivist theory — a theory that posits reality is entirely constructed in and through the ways in which a particualr groups of people understands it. It is historical, always examining the politcal history of each idea or notion.
They argued that legal categories, by crating and maintaining certain descriptions of soical and legal arrangments, foreclose other eays of thinging about and organizing human life. They sought to show that legal doctrine is contradictory, that legal rules are indeterminate, and that the operation fo legal institutions is systematically biased in favor of economically and socially prieledged elites.
In the court's words, "the concept that the government may restrict the speech of someelements of our society in oder to enhance the relative voice of others is wholly foregn to the First Amendment." The effort at equalization is not within the perssible ends of governement. As far as the firstamendment is concerned, the state must take disparties in wealth, and the existence of some with more "vocie" than others, as part of nature for which the governement bears no responsibility."
Cass Sunstein, Columbia Law Review
