Critical legal studies is one of the most challenging developments in the contemporary study of law. Drawing heavily on the radical political culture of the period since the 1960s, critical legal studies assents the necessity of a politics of law - a politics which sees law, not as something apart, but as engaged in the multitude of arguments, battles and struggles which produce the human condition. Such a committment decisively rejects the dominant tradition of Anglo-American legal scholarship, the expository orthodoxy (...) or, more crudely, the 'black-letter law' approach. The essays in this book provide the first wide ranging exploration of the aims and scope of critical legal studies in Britain. They draw on a diversity of intellectual traditions, including feminism, Marxism, critical theory and deconstruction and explore the implications of the critical approach for important areas such as property, contract, company, and labour law. (shrink)

This paper explores how undergraduate students understood the social relevance of their engineering course content knowledge and drew broader social and ethical implications from that knowledge. Based on a three-year qualitative study in a junior-level engineering class, we found that students had difficulty in acknowledging the social and ethical aspects of engineering as relevant topics in their coursework. Many students considered the immediate technical usability or improved efficiency of technical innovations as the noteworthy social and ethical implications of engineering. Findings (...) suggest that highly-structured engineering programs leave little room for undergraduate students to explore the ethical dimension of engineering content knowledge and interact with other students/programs on campus to expand their “technically-minded” perspective. We discussed the issues of the “culture of disengagement” :42–72, 2014) fueled by disciplinary elitism, spatial distance, and insulated curriculum prevalent in the current structure of engineering programs. We called for more conscious effort by engineering educators to offer meaningful interdisciplinary engagement opportunities and in-class conversations on ethics that support engineering students' holistic intellectual growth and well-rounded professional ethics. (shrink)