Monday, March 14, 2011

Restoring Objectivity to "Justice"

The Biblical view of justice as seen through Deutoronomy 10:12-19, Jeremiah 22:3, Micah 6:8, and James 1:27 is that Christians are morally obligated to defend the poor, oppressed, and suffering. These verses repeatedly discuss the poor and the widowed, and reinforce that justice is an obedience to God which shows love to the suffering. Also, justice is objective to the moral standards and commandments of God. God requires that we establish justice through obedience to this objective standard He has established.
Critical Legal Studies (CLS), on the other hand, not only practices a subjective view of "justice" and "equality," but also flat-out denies the possibility of objectivity in the interpretation of law. It unites the concept of law (which is usually thought objective and factual) and politics (usually thought subjective and opinion-based). Critical Legal Studies is influenced ultimately by the relativism of Postmodernism, from it's deconstructionist view of language, to its relativist views on law. However, CLS also takes much of its concept of justice and equality from mild forms of Marxism, conceptualizing the political realm as a struggle against "dominant political ideology," which is viewed as essentially bad. CLS catagorizes the world in "dualities: subjective-objective, male-female, public-private..." etc. (legal-dictionary 3). By catagorizing the world in opposites, CLS sets itself up for the idea of thesis and antithesis clashing and forming a synthesis-- essentially the Marxist dialectic. Also, "CLS theorists" generally "object to capitalism as an economic system" (3). In conclusion, we see that Critical Legal Studies is influenced largely by the Postmodern and Marxist worldviews.

No comments:

Post a Comment