critical legal studies a loose assemblage of legal writings and thinkers in the United States and Great Britain since the mid-1970s that aspire to a jurisprudence and a political ideology. Like the American legal realists of the 1920s and 1930s, the jurisprudential program is largely negative, consisting in the discovery of supposed contradictions within both the law as a whole and areas of law such as contracts and criminal law. The jurisprudential implication derived from such supposed contradictions within the law is that any decision in any case can be defended as following logically from some authoritative propositions of law, making the law completely without guidance in particular cases. Also like the American legal realists, the political ideology of critical legal studies is vaguely leftist, embracing the communitarian critique of liberalism. Communitarians fault liberalism for its alleged overemphasis on individual rights and individual welfare at the expense of the intrinsic value of certain collective goods. Given the cognitive relativism of many of its practitioners, critical legal studies tends not to aspire to have anything that could be called a theory of either law or of politics. See also JURISPRUDENCE , PHILOSOPHY OF LAW, POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. M.S.M.