Shadows across the Path 461Hostility to liberalism has been another hallmark of critical legal stud-
ies. Th is is apparent in its strongly collectivist outlook. It is comparatively
indiff erent— or even actively hostile— to concerns of human rights and civil
liberties. Kennedy has been critical of human- rights law for reducing people
to the status of mere “right- holders,” an approach that “blunts awareness of
diversity, of the continuity of human experience, of overlapping identities.”
In place of liberties for individuals, bolstered by the rule of law (with these
in turn fortifi ed by legal sanctions or protective mechanisms), the critical
school substitutes direct, and collective, po liti cal activism by formerly ex-
cluded groups. What is important, it insists, is that the excluded groups
seize po liti cal, social, and economic power, not that they be the objects of
paternalistic protection by existing elites.
Like the New Haven School, critical legal studies would have nothing to
do with the anti- intellectualism that sometimes characterized mainstream
positivism. On the contrary, it is densely soaked in theory. But where the
New Haven School’s heritage was in po liti cal science, social choice theory,
and similar fi elds, the critical legal theorists have owed much to Eu ro pe an
structuralist thought in linguistics and anthropology. Th ey tend to see law
in terms of language— as a conversation, dialogue, rhetoric, or narrative,
rather than as a set of overarching rules.
Critical legal studies is therefore a combination of sometimes forbiddingly
dense theoretical exposition with a ringing call to radical po liti cal action. In
this regard, too, it bears some resemblance to the New Haven School. But it
has strongly rejected the New Haven School’s elitist, managerial outlook, as
well as its sunny optimism. Kennedy, for example, has bluntly criticized the
New Haven group for being “associated with establishment social engineering
and the status quo.”
Th e aura of pessimism and negativity has imbued the critical- studies move-
ment with something of an ethos of paranoia and resentment, thereby ensur-
ing that it would be only a minority taste. But the movement was also
marked by a brash determination to break out of established paths, along with
a mission to penetrate appearances, unmask hypocrisy, and bring power to
the oppressed. Like the New Haven School, of which it is a sort of negative
shadow, critical legal studies may be said to have been an opener of minds
more than a doer of deeds. But the value of opening minds should not be
underestimated.