Psychosocial cls a Comment on the Cardozo Symposium

AFTERWORD PSYCHO-SOCIAL CLS: A COMMENT ON THE CARDOZO SYMPOSIUM Duncan Kennedy In this comment, I'm going to talk about what the Cardozo cls symposium tells us about the "state of the movement.” The state of the movement, as reflected in the symposium articles, is that it is rapidly institutionalizing itself. The articles as a group indicate that there is a "universe of discourse" called cls, which is similar to other universes of discourse in academia. Within the universe, there are many kinds of professional activity, none of which exhausts in itself what it is to be "involved." There are many different kinds of writing people do, and many different attitudes they adopt, both toward the movement itself and toward its surrounding milieu. The articles illustrate the crosscutting relations that bind and separate the participants in an institutionalized academic intellectual movement. These are structured along familiar dimensions. A few are: young and old, male and female, veteran and neophyte, insider and outsider, mentor and mentee, and tenured and untenured. All of these relations are powerfully, sometimes overpoweringly conditioned by the place of the participants in the professional hierarchy within which the movement exists. The articles hint at the problems faced by specifically leftwing intellectual movements that attempt to institutionalize themselves within academic disciplines (in this case legal education) dominated by the liberal ...