Critical legal studies (CLS) is a school of critical theory that first emerged as a movement in the United States during the 1970s. Critical Legal Studies adherents claim that laws are used to maintain the status quo of society's power structures; it is also held that the law is a codified form of society's biases against marginalized groups. Despite wide variation in the opinions of critical legal scholars around the world there is general consensus regarding the key goals of Critical Legal Studies:
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian scholar, literary theorist, and feminist critic. She is a University Professor at Columbia University and a founding member of the establishment's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.
Barbara Herrnstein Smith is an American literary critic and theorist, best known for her work Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. She is currently the Braxton Craven Professor of Comparative Literature and English and director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory at Duke University, and also Distinguished Professor of English at Brown University.
Jack David Zipes is a professor emeritus of German, comparative literature, and cultural studies, who has published and lectured on German literature, critical theory, German Jewish culture, children's literature, and folklore. In the latter part of his career he translated two major editions of the tales of the Brothers Grimm and focused on fairy tales, their evolution, and their social and political role in civilizing processes. According to Zipes, fairy tales "serve a meaningful social function, not just for compensation but for revelation: the worlds projected by the best of our fairy tales reveal the gaps between truth and falsehood in our immediate society." His arguments are avowedly based on the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and more recently theories of cultural evolution.
German studies is the field of humanities that researches, documents, and disseminates German language and literature in both its historic and present forms. Academic departments of German studies often include classes on German culture, German history, and German politics in addition to the language and literature component. Common German names for the field are Germanistik, Deutsche Philologie, and Deutsche Sprachwissenschaft und Literaturwissenschaft. In English the terms Germanistics or Germanics are sometimes used, but the subject is more often referred to as German studies, German language and literature, or German philology.
Elaine Scarry is an American essayist and professor of English and American Literature and Language. She is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. Her interests include Theory of Representation, the Language of Physical Pain, and Structure of Verbal and Material Making in Art, Science and the Law. She was formerly Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a recipient of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism.
David E. Wellbery is an American professor of German Studies at the University of Chicago. He is currently the chair of the department of Germanic Studies and holds the LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professorship in the department. In 2020 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
The law and literature movement focuses on the interdisciplinary connection between law and literature. This field has roots in two major developments in the intellectual history of law—first, the growing doubt about whether law in isolation is a source of value and meaning, or whether it must be plugged into a large cultural or philosophical or social-science context to give it value and meaning; and, second, the growing focus on the mutability of meaning in all texts, whether literary or legal. Those who work in the field stress one or the other of two complementary perspectives: Law in literature and law as literature.
Georgina Emma Mary Born, is a British academic, anthropologist and musician. As a musician she is known as Georgie Born and is known for her work in Henry Cow and with Lindsay Cooper.
Rita Felski is an academic and critic, who holds the William R. Kenan Jr. Professorship of English at the University of Virginia and is a former editor of New Literary History. She is also Niels Bohr Professor at the University of Southern Denmark (2016-2021).
Robyn R. Warhol is an American literary scholar, associated in particular with feminist narrative theory, of which she is considered one of the originators. She is currently an Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University and a core faculty member of Project Narrative. Warhol received her BA in English from Pomona College in 1977 and her PhD in English and American Literature from Stanford University in 1982, where she studied with Thomas Moser, George Dekker, and Ian Watt.
David Punter is Professor of English at the University of Bristol. He is the author of many critical studies, and has been internationally recognised as an expert on Gothic culture.
Peter Jaszi is a widely known expert on copyright law and author, with Patricia Aufderheide, of Reclaiming Fair Use (2012), which examines the state of fair use and the importance to scholarship, art, and free expression of strengthening the doctrine.
Yvanka B. Raynova is a Bulgarian philosopher, feminist, editor, translator, and publisher. She is full professor of contemporary philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and director of the Institute for Axiological Research in Vienna. Her research interests include western philosophy, continental philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, philosophical anthropology, axiology, value theory, feminist philosophy, gender studies, intercultural philosophy, religious studies, translation studies, and the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Paul Ricoeur. She has translated into Bulgarian Sartre's Being and Nothingness and Ricoeur's The Conflict of Interpretations. She is chief editor of various book series and journals, including the Peter Lang series "Philosophie, Phänomenologie und Hermeneutik der Werte" and Labyrinth: An International Journal of Philosophy, Value Theory and Sociocultural Hermeneutics, as well as program director of the Austrian publishing company Axia Academic Publishers.
Regina Schwartz is a scholar of English literature and elements of Jewish and Christian religion. A Professor of English and Religion at Northwestern University, she has been known historically for her research and teaching on 17th-century literature, on the Hebrew Bible, and on the interface of literature with the subjects of philosophy, law, and religion.
Roberta Frank is an American philologist specializing in Old English and Old Norse language and literature. She is Marie Borroff Professor Emeritus of English, with a courtesy appointment in Linguistics, at Yale University.
Lorna Margaret Hutson, FBA is the ninth Merton Professor of English Literature and a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. Together with Professor John Hudson, she is a director of The Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Law and Literature at the University of St Andrews.
Miriam Cather Simpson is a New Zealand-American physics/chemistry academic and entrepreneur. She is currently a professor at the University of Auckland, a joint appointment between the physics and chemistry departments. She is the founder of the Photon Factory laser lab at the University of Auckland and the chief science officer for two spin-off companies, Engender Technologies and Orbis Diagnostics. She is an Associate Investigator for the Dodd-Walls Centre for Photonic and Quantum Technologies and an Emeritus Investigator for the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology. She was awarded the Royal Society Te Apārangi Pickering Medal in 2019. She has a strong focus on teaching, mentoring and public outreach and is an outspoken advocate for issues of gender equality and ethics in science.
Mary Romero is an American sociologist. She is Professor of Justice Studies and Social Inquiry at Arizona State University, with affiliations in African and African American Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and Asian Pacific American Studies. Before her arrival at ASU in 1995, she taught at University of Oregon, San Francisco State University, and University of Wisconsin-Parkside. Professor Romero holds a bachelor's degree in sociology with a minor in Spanish from Regis College in Denver, Colorado. She holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Colorado. In 2019, she served as the 110th President of the American Sociological Association.
