The Critical Lawyers Handbook 2

This text focuses on some of the key legal areas which have become increasingly important in recent years; particularly race, gender, the environment and international law. Considering how critical legal studies might inform radical legal and political practice, the contributors focus on the celebration of diversity and difference that characterizes critical legal scholarship. They examine how the law supresses diversity by excluding and silencing some voices while privileging others, particularly on the grounds of gender or race. They highlight the extent to which traditional interpretations of international law ignore questions of economic and political inequality - despite the recent insistence on increasing globalization. They ask how effective the law - and the rule of the law - really are in pursuing the goals of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism, and in dealing with the problems of racial and sexual inequality, ecological destruction and international instability. They promote the development of new and valuable sensitivities which focus on those dimensions of human experience often ignored, while at the same time arguing that a critical (legal) understanding of capitalism has never been more urgently needed, if the law is to have any role to play in fighting oppression.