An interesting article by New York Law School professor Rebecca Roif. Taste:
Many, if not most, students in the 1980s and 90s bought academic texts on what is 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 an unconventional but not noble goal.
Legal institutions are just an evil disguise that allows the powerful to exploit the weak.
Law is a flawed but not a mechanism worthy of improvement, but a bad institution to weaponize or dismantle.
Our law school lecture halls are now filled with professors and students who believe these things. In their view, the profession is no longer the indispensable gatekeeper of the rule of law, but a core element of the American establishment. Instead, it is part of the problem: a white, racist, oppressive cycle that uses its claims of righteousness to mask its oppression of the powerless.Such thinking is a big problem for Jews.
They say, read the whole thing. I think there is much more to say about how critical legal studies and its offshoots were a rebellion, and not just against the dominant legal liberalism of the past, but against a particular kind of mid-century legal liberalism whose Jewish champions were wildly inconsistent. represented, and whose triumph coincided with the rise of Jews in the legal profession and legal academy.
It is not a coincidence, and it certainly did not go unnoticed, that in the mid-80s when students at Harvard and Yale began to protest the oppressive liberalism and “white” demographics of the Yale and Harvard faculty, the old WASP faculty largely left or left, and the plurality or majority replaced by Jewish professors. Jewish-born liberals like Wayne Feiss, Harry Hillel Wellington (who was forced to change his last name from Weinstein that day), and Nazi refugee Guido Calabresi were found to represent institutionally (if not personally) the racist old guard as Jews rose to power. Concerns were less likely to be empathetic.