ABSTRACT
ORIGINS AND AIMS OF CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES WHAT ARE CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES? In the narrow sense, the term Critical Legal Studies refers to a movement which originated in the US in the 1970s as a response to an increasing political and legal conservatism. This movement is, for all intents and purposes, now defunct. The name, however, endures: in the broad sense, Critical Legal Studies, or CLS, encompass a plurality of different critical perspectives on law which have been flourishing for the past three decades. As the abbreviation CLS is often used to refer to the movement, so is the term ‘crit’ used to refer to its participants.
