Clark on Critical Legal Studies

[The Law School is crazy to work at; there is an inbred notion of what's good scholarship, and I think it's about time somebody exercised independent review. --quoted in a 1987 National Law Journal article

Let us start with the [Critical Legal Studies students. The trouble with many students is that they do not have the faintest idea of how one goes about proving something. They have no experience with sound techniques for acquiring reliable knowledge or determining whether a belief that is essential to a value choice is well grounded or not. In my courses, this is evidenced over and over again, and I am always moved to exasperation when it occurs.

Now to the other half of the problem. Many law faculty members, and here the critical legal studies people are clearly the worst offenders, not only do not appreciate or understand what it means to prove something, but they believe it is wrongheaded to try to do so. For the defenders of critical legal studies, the type of scientific inquiry praciticed in the natural sciences is a misguided thing to attempt when inquiring into the social world...

I think that both of the CLS dogmas--that scientific knowledge is impossible or meaningless and that the attempt to get it inevitably leads to defeatism and illegitimate justifications of the status quo--are deeply pernicious, and have to be combatted in legal education. It is very bad to indoctrinate students with these attitudes.   --from a symposium at the 1984 Federalist Society Meeting, printed in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Spring 1985