Critical Legal Studies as a Spiritual Practice

Abstract

I assume that I was asked to speak on a panel entitled "The Higher Law and Its Critics" because the organizers of this conference believed that as a Critical Legal Studies (CLS) founder and writer, I'd debunk the idea that there is any higher law. They likely felt that CLS stands for the idea that law and the interpretations of law are just an expression of social power, and that any claim that there exists a higher law which the existing legal world somehow exists in relation to would just be regarded by CLS as a form of ideology-mystifying, masking, and rationalizing existing power relations in society. So let me start by saying that while appeals to a Higher Law certainly can be used to rationalize unjust power relations, I do not at all believe that they must do so; and even more, that I believe CLS was always fundamentally a spiritual enterprise that sought to liberate law and legal interpretation from its self-referential, circular, and ideological shackles.