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I assume that I was asked to speak on a panel entitled "The Higher Law and Its Critics" because the organizers of this conference believed that as a Critical Legal Studies (CLS) founder and writer, I'd debunk the idea that there is any higher law.They likely felt that CLS stands for the idea that law and the interpretations of law are just an expression of social power, and that any claim that there exists a higher law which the existing legal world somehow exists in relation to would just be regarded by CLS as a form of ideology-mystifying, masking, and rationalizing existing power relations in society.So let me start by saying that while appeals to a Higher Law certainly can be used to rationalize unjust power relations, I do not at all believe that they must do so; and even more, that I believe CLS was always fundamentally a spiritual enterprise that sought to liberate law and legal interpretation from its self-referential, circular, and ideological shackles.The CLS movement, after all, emerged in response to the moral intensity of the broader social movements of the 1960s, and was an attempt to join forces with the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the women's and workers' movements to challenge the status quo on behalf of a higher moral vision of what human relations could be like-a vision of a world in which people treated each other with true equality and respect and affection and kindness, and in which people saw each other as fully human and beautiful, rather than as cogs in a machine or as self-interested monads out for their own gain or as any of the other ways of characterizing human beings that seemed to be commonplace within the system as it was.In CLS, we were against the inhumanity of the system as it really was and as it really