Schlegel on Critical Legal History Without a Privileged Position

John Henry Schlegel, University at Buffalo Law School, is publishing Sez Who? Critical Legal History Without a Privileged Position in the Oxford Handbook of Historical Legal Rseearch (Markus D. Dubber and Christopher Tomlins, eds., Oxford University Press, --). Here is the abstract.

Scholars active in the Critical Legal Studies movement of the 1980s regularly attacked the scholarship of liberal legalist scholars by using a variety of then contemporary epistemological theories that argued for the impossibility of any observer attaining a neutral position from which to observe social activities. Somewhat surprisingly, liberal legalist scholars seldom turned this criticism back at the work of CLS scholars who themselves never criticized their own work as they did that of other scholars. The examination of several pieces of CLS inspired history of labor law shows how engaging in such self-criticism might have further strengthened this very strong body of scholarship.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.