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Jurisprudence Commons

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University at Buffalo School of Law

Critical Legal Studies

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What's Left?, Guyora Binder Jul 1991

What's Left?, Guyora Binder

Journal Articles

Addressing the future of radical politics at the end of the cold war, this article offers a reconstruction of radical theory around the goal of enabling collaborative self-realization through participatory democratic politics. It offers an interpretation of the radical tradition as defined by a view of human nature as a cultural artifact, and a conception of liberation as the self-conscious transformation of human nature. It proceeds to critique radical theory’s traditional focus on revolution as the means of radical transformation. Distinguishing instrumental and self-expressive conceptions of transformation it critiques revolutionary processes as tending to reproduce instrumental culture. It offers democratic …


On Critical Legal Studies As Guerilla Warfare, Guyora Binder Oct 1987

On Critical Legal Studies As Guerilla Warfare, Guyora Binder

Journal Articles

This sardonic 1987 essay defended Critical Legal Studies (CLS) against alarmist attacks from the right, claiming that CLS was dangerously subversive of the rule of law, and seemingly contradictory attacks from the left dismissing CLS as empty theorizing lacking any practical implications for reform. The essay responded that while CLS lacked proposals for legislative reform, it favored a highly participatory process of reform, drawn from experience in the student movements of the 1960’s. It distrusted state power and bureaucracy as engines of change, and favored community organization, civil society, and popular mobilization.