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Show 125 throughout the 20th century. These groups, particularly the Legal Realists, argue that "ideology" is not something that can be separated from the "rule of law" because neutrality is an impossible objective, even for lawyers trained with the technical skills for how to interpret law. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was at the fore of this movement and believed that legal scholars should hold a sense of "moral skepticism" against the outdated forces of natural law, which was clearly influential to the development of legal formalism (Epstein, 2003, p. 67). In Abrams v. United States (1919), Holmes said in his dissent: "We should be eternally vigilant against the attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death." His pragmatism and general critical insight had significant influence on regulatory law during the New Deal Era and contributed to the development of what is known as Critical Legal Studies. Critical Legal Studies takes deconstructive impulses to the law to "debunk the privileged position of ‘the law' as an absolute, universalized, neutral authority, and to empower their critique of it as a ‘local' method for achieving a culturally radical egalitarianism" (Lucaites, 1990, p. 436). As Hasian and Croasmun (1996) observe, there are four key components to the CLS movement: "All law is politics; all law is indeterminate; the concept of any ‘rule of law' is incoherent; and deconstruction is a valid means of demystifying the law" (p. 387). From this perspective, the metaphysical distinctions used to establish founding rationalist principles of the law have been used to "hide the fact that both sides of a dispute have an arsenal of rhetorical devices that can be used to legitimate an almost infinite number of policy propositions" (p. 388). From an ANT perspective, analyzing legal rhetoric must account for the legal and extra-legal elements of articulation that produce particular rhetorical cultures, alliances, |
