ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at some key aspects of the conflict between traditional legal theory and its more radical critics in recent decades. Socialist, feminist and race theory critics of law, for example, are concerned with the injustice towards subordinate social classes, repressed women and ethnic minorities, injustices that are argued to be perpetuated by legal institutions and reinforced by legal theory. In presenting law and justice as necessary antagonists, on the grounds that law in its very nature closes up and congeals the reality of justice into the general rules, norms and values of legality, Derrida contrasts the letter and spirit of the law. The emergence of critical legal studies (CLS) as a loose-knit movement in the USA and Britain in the late 1970s owed as much to the earlier legal realists as it did to these critical developments in postmodernist philosophy.
