Abstract
This is a reflection on the engagement of the critical legal studies movement with law school teaching, focused on the teaching of private law, which I know best. I'm putting aside the many other things that were going on in legal education at the time that affected law school teaching in related ways, such as the rise of clinical teaching and social activism, increases in the number of women and people of color in law schools, and the overall surge in enrollments. Common themes and approaches ran through the state of law teaching prior to the advent of CLS. Legal realism had undermined the concept of a formal rule system but had not entirely abolished it. A key element of the law school experience was teaching students " thinking like a lawyer, " but there was no systematic meaning to that concept. Instead, it was composed of a variety of craft skills, such as generating broad and narrow holdings of cases and applying maxims of interpretations to statutes, and relatively unsystematic policy analysis. The jurisprudence about legal reasoning had not deeply penetrated the doctrinal classroom. Particular subjects had core concepts— the protection of legitimate expectations in contract law, optimal incentives for proper conduct in tort law—which allowed for a degree of armchair empiricism and the construction of arguments about desirable results. The combination of method and substance led students either to a belief that private law broadly supported the existing social and economic order, with room for change at the margins (neoclassical contract law is a good example), or to a skepticism about law based on the malleability of rules.