Marxism and Legal Studies: On the Margins

Susan Dianne Brophy
Associate Professor in Legal Studies, St. Jerome’s University, Canada

In the footnotes of an article published in 2012, Christopher Tomlins mentions critical legal studies and its “disengagement from critical Marxism” (Tomlins, 2012: 159, note 2). He describes it as an “epistemological break” from materialism, fuelled also by concerns regarding “dismissal by association” with Marxism in general. The occasion for his article was a retrospective on Robert Gordon’s famed essay from 1984, ‘Critical Legal Histories’, and in his own footnote, Tomlins was pointing to footnotes in Gordon’s essay to argue that the canonical piece was “deeply haunted by Marxism”. The inspiration for the approach I adopt in this blog post stems from comments in—and observations on—footnotes from these renowned legal studies authors, both of whom ponder the legacy of Marxist theory when it comes to critical approaches to legal studies.