This text focuses on some of the key legal areas which have become increasingly important in recent years; particularly race, gender, the environment and international law. Considering how critical legal studies might inform radical legal and political practice, the contributors focus on the celebration of diversity and difference that characterizes critical legal scholarship. They examine how the law supresses diversity by excluding and silencing some voices while privileging others, particularly on the grounds of gender or race. They highlight the extent to which traditional interpretations of international law ignore questions of economic and political inequality - despite the recent insistence on increasing globalization. They ask how effective the law - and the rule of the law - really are in pursuing the goals of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism, and in dealing with the problems of racial and sexual inequality, ecological destruction and international instability. They promote the development of new and valuable sensitivities which focus on those dimensions of human experience often ignored, while at the same time arguing that a critical (legal) understanding of capitalism has never been more urgently needed, if the law is to have any role to play in fighting oppression.

Table of Contents:
Part 1 International Law: the legitimation of power in world affairs, Sol Picciotto; pure law in an impure world, Wade Mansell; public international law and private enterprise - damages for a killing in East Timor, Roger S. Clark. Part 2 Race: a critical approach to race and law, Werner Menski; the racial, ethnic and cultural values underpinning current legal education, Aimee Paterson; new Europe, old story - racism, law and the European Community, Peter Fitzpatrick; defining the refugee by race - the European response to new asylum-seekers, Patricia Tuitt; race and criminal justice, Makbool Javaid. Part 3 Gender: arguing equality - how to avoid the hidden traps, Gillian More; feminist perspectives on the law of tort, Joanne Conaghan; women, law and medical power, Sally Sheldon; the campaign to free Kiranjit Ahluwalia, Pragna Patel; feminist perspectives on law, Kathryn de Gama. Part 4 Environment: an idiomatic discussion of environmental legislation, David Wilkinson; private rights and environmental protection, John Wightman and Donald McGillivray; the case against patents in genetic engineering.