Comments by "wily wascal" (@wilywascal2024) on "Florida Banned Critical Race Theory, But Can’t Define What It Is" video.
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@Schlabbeflicker ~ CRT is actually a subgroup of Critical Legal Theory, more commonly known as Critical Legal Studies.
CLS includes several subgroups with fundamentally different, even contradictory, views. Feminist legal theory examines the role of gender in the law. Critical race theory (CRT) examines the role of race in the law. Postmodernism is a critique of the law influenced by developments in literary theory, and it emphasizes political economy and the economic context of legal decisions and issues.
Critical legal studies (CLS) is a theory which states that the law is necessarily intertwined with social issues, particularly stating that the law has inherent social biases. Proponents of CLS believe that the law supports the interests of those who create the law. As such, CLS states that the law supports a power dynamic which favors the historically privileged and disadvantages the historically underprivileged. CLS finds that the wealthy and the powerful use the law as an instrument for oppression in order to maintain their place in hierarchy. Many in the CLS movement want to overturn the hierarchical structures of modern society and they focus on the law as a tool in achieving this goal. CLS was officially started in 1977 at a conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but its roots extend earlier to when many of its founding members participated in social activism surrounding the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War. The founders of CLS borrowed from non-legal fields such as social theory, political philosophy, economics, and literary theory. Among noted CLS theorists are Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Robert W. Gordon, and Duncan Kennedy. CLS has been largely contained within the United States. While influenced to some extent by European philosophers, such as Karl Marx, Max Weber, Max Horkheimer, Antonio Gramsci, and Michel Foucault, CLS has borrowed heavily from Legal Realism, the school of legal thought that flourished in America in the 1920s and 1930s. Like CLS scholars, legal realists rebelled against accepted legal theories of the day and urged the legal field to pay more attention to the social context of the law.
Legal realism is a naturalistic approach to law. It is the view that jurisprudence should emulate the methods of natural science, i.e., rely on empirical evidence. Hypotheses must be tested against observations of the world. Legal realists believe that legal science should only investigate law with the value-free methods of natural sciences, rather than through philosophical inquiries into the nature and meaning of the law that are separate and distinct from the law as it is actually practiced. Indeed, legal realism asserts that the law cannot be separated from its application, nor can it be understood outside of its application. As such, legal realism emphasizes law as it actually exists, rather than the law as it ought to be. Locating the meaning of law in areas like legal opinions issued by judges and their deference or dismissal of the past precedent and the doctrine of stare decisis, it stresses the importance of understanding the factors involved in judicial decision making.
Legal realism is associated with American jurisprudence during the 1920s and 1930s, particularly amongst federal judges and lawyers within the Roosevelt administration. Notable jurists associated with legal realism include Felix Cohen, Morris Cohen, Arthur Corbin, Walter Wheeler Cook, Robert Hale, Wesley Hohfeld, Karl Llewellyn, Underhill Moore, Herman Oliphant and Warren Seavey, many of whom were associated with Yale Law School. As Keith Bybee argues, "legal realism exposed the role played by politics in judicial decision-making and, in doing so, called into question conventional efforts to anchor judicial power on a fixed, impartial foundation." Contemporary legal scholars working within the Law and Society tradition have expanded upon the foundations set by legal realism to postulate what has been referred to as new legal realism.
As a form of jurisprudence, legal realism is defined by its focus on the law as it actually exists in practice, rather than how it exists on the books. To this end, it was primarily concerned with the actions of judges and the factors that influenced processes of judicial decision making. As Karl Llewellyn argues, “behind decisions stand judges; judges are men; as men they have human backgrounds.” The law, therefore, did not exist in a metaphysical realm of fundamental rules or principles, but was inseparable from human action and the power of judges to determine the law. In order to understand the decisions and actions of legal actors, legal realists turned to the ideas of the social sciences in order to understand the human behavior and relationships that culminated in a given legal outcome.
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@punkgrl325 ~ You got it backwards. If anything, it would be neo-Marxism being a cornerstone of CRT. But I don't think that's quite accurate, either. While it may have provided some inspiration and some aspects of it share rough similarities, don't find that as forming the basis for CRT. Critical race theory examines social, cultural and legal issues as they relate to race and racism, particularly institutionalized and systemic racism. Don't think it is based upon or confined to any one socio-political ideology. Unlike socio-political ideologies like neo-Marxism, while it may have broader application, it was designed and intended primarily as a way of perceiving and addressing problems specifically in regard to racism in America.
Generally agree with the rest of your reply, although I think there is more to it than just a contrived culture war issue and reactionary politics. It is a thinly veiled appeal to white supremacists and an attempt to perpetuate racism by the right. It's not a dog-whistle; it's a bullhorn. It's the right-wing transforming itself into the Reich-wing and unabashedly embracing fascism. That's what really needs to be recognized, acknowledged, and addressed----not the resulting dishonest conflation of CRT with Marxism, which is used to distract and deflect. And, ironically, the recent backlash it has generated only further validates the concept and teaching of CRT, while simultaneously underscoring the descent of the GOP into an evil entity that can no longer be considered loyal opposition.
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