The intellectual movement known as Critical Legal Studies (‘CLS’) emerged in the United States in the late 1970s, and quickly spread to Europe. The movement was united rather more by a set of progressive political attitudes than agreement on a particular theoretical perspective. The political orientation was leftist, but not Marxist, and, as the movement evolved, it increasingly stressed issues concerning minorities and identity politics, until it dissolved into these other streams, such as critical race theory, in the 1990s. In its distinctive views about legal theory and the function of law in society, the CLS movement drew upon the earlier American progressive movement in legal theory known as Legal Realism, but it modified in significant ways that earlier instrumentalist and pragmatic account of legal thought.
Hugh Collins, "Critical Legal Studies," in The New Oxford Companion to Law
The Crits from Sabrina Zanella-Foresi on Vimeo.
The Crits is a short film by Harvard law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen about the history of critical legal studies. For more information, see Harvard Law Today.