Unbound is an online journal of the legal left at Harvard Law School – and also the community of left-affiliated students, professors, and practitioners who publish it.

Like many on the legal left, we feel a bit homeless. Others have built substantial “progressive” organizations and law reviews that support, channel, and house their political and intellectual endeavors. While we often sympathize with and participate in activist projects that advance economic redistribution, human rights, and racial, gender and sexual equality, we are unsatisfied with the constraining language of liberalism within which such projects tend to operate. We’d like something spicier and more satisfying, a place where we can refine our ideas without having to justify our existence to unsympathetic critics.

In today’s legal world, conservatives have convinced many that legal decisions must be made on the basis of “original understanding” or “economic efficiency,” terms which are not facially invalid but which often mask more nefarious goals. The growing dominance of the right challenges us to reinvent the left. Furthermore, we suspect that deep discursive patterns and practices in the law create and maintain oppressions, and that our projects within the current legal framework may merely shift the sands a bit. By eliminating one form of oppression, we may create another.

Therefore, Unbound seeks to begin a redefinition project, staking out a place for left legal intellectual discussion and formulating a new set of ideas for a new century. Two decades after the birth of Critical Legal Studies, there is an urgent need for new politics based upon and interacting with new theory. This discussion must include both systemic critique and productive self-interrogation, both of which we plan to promote in Unbound.

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