SOLM181 Critical Jurisprudence
Module Description
The stewards of contemporary legal systems commonly present law as a system bound to its internal norms and procedures as set forth in constitutions, legislation, judicial pronouncements, and all concomitant institutions and procedures. Many jurists have long assumed that this self-sufficiency allows law to operate as a system separate from, and even impartial to, society’s broader cultural, economic, and political forces. But is this description of law reliable? Critical theorists have scrutinised it by showing how law’s purportedly neutral and objective norms and practices serve in reality to promote elite power, often to the detriment of those people who would be most in need of greater justice through law. In particular, critical theorists examine how these power hierarchies are constructed by, but then in turn actively construct, socio-legal categories such as class, ethnicity, gender, or religion. Much of their analysis shows how lawmaking and adjudication within Western liberal democracies deploy formal – ‘official’ or ‘on paper’ – guarantees of individual autonomy, equal citizenship, political participation, and the rule of law to procure the opposite of what they promise, often serving to entrench undemocratic conditions of arbitrary control, civic inequality, socio-political hierarchies, and unjust law, by privileging elites while subordinating socio-legal outsiders.
Applicable Groupings
Credits
15 Credits