An interesting essay by New York Law School professor Rebecca Roiphe. A taste:
Many, if not most, students have bought into academic lessons peddled in the 1980s and '90s as an outgrowth of what's often called critical legal theory. Among them:
Law is not a neutral institution designed to ensure the peaceful resolution of disputes in a diverse society.
Neutrality is not an unachieved but noble goal.
Legal institutions are just a vicious guise that allows the powerful to exploit the weak.
The law is not a flawed but worthy process to improve, but an evil institution to weaponize or dismantle.
The lecture halls in our law schools are now filled with professors and students who believe these things. In their view, the profession is no longer an essential gatekeeper of the rule of law, a key component of the American founding. Instead, it's a part of the problem: a white, racist, oppressive clique that uses its claims of fairness to mask its oppression of the powerless.This kind of thinking is a big problem for Jews.
As they say, read the whole thing. I think there is also much more to say on the topic about how Critical Legal Studies and its offshoots were and are rebellions not just against formerly dominant legal liberalism, but against a particular kind of mid-century legal liberalism among whose champions Jews were wildly disproportionately represented, and the triumph of which coincided with the rise of Jews in the legal profession and (especially) the legal academy.
