On Foreign Ground: Grand Narratives, Situated Specificities, and the Praxis of Critical Theory and Law

Abstract

This article is the first part of a two-part project which is critical of trends in contemporary U.S. critical and interdisciplinary legal scholarship and pedagogy. The larger project seeks to use this critique to model fruitful approaches to critical and theoretical scholarship in law “beyond 2000”.The focus of this article’s criticism is the work of two significant scholars of the second wave of what might broadly be called CLS scholarship, or more precisely critical, theoretical and interdisciplinary legal scholarship: Jack Balk in and Pierre Schlag. Looking back to the work of Duncan Kennedy and Stanley Fish, respectively progenitors of CLS and of theoretical interdisciplinary legal scholarship in the U.S., it is argued that the work of all four is marked by two significant flaws: lack of self-reflexivity and a desire for a realm of theory which unselfconsciously adopts the Cartesian split subject. The article then uses the work of Vicki Kirby and Pierre Bourdieu both to identify the tendencies it critiques, and to suggest why the work of Terry Threadgold and Peter Goodrich might provide models for a praxis of critical theory in law which is of particular use in the context of professional subject formation.