Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2-2026

Abstract

The resistance of capitalist inequality to legal reform has led a growing number of scholars to reconsider the explanatory virtues of Marxist legal thought. But what are those virtues? Some scholars hold that what makes Marxist legal thought special is its ability to explain the development of legal relationships in terms of the development of extra-legal relationships — specifically, the relations of production as they adapt to changes in the productive forces. Other scholars argue that this focus on the causal process by which extra-legal change (or stasis) drives legal change (or stasis) is too reductive. They contend that Marxist legal thought has historically gone awry when it discounted the constitutive power or relative autonomy of law — that is, law’s ability to transform society.3 What divides the two camps thus seems to be differing assumptions about the causal relationship between the legal and the extra-legal.

In “Marx, Marxism, and the Critique of Law,” Umut Özsu makes a compelling case for law’s significance within the Marxist tradition. In doing so, however, he also reveals the logical and interpretive elisions that typify Marxist efforts to avoid reducing legal relations to extra-legal relations by affirming the constitutive power of law. Of course, those committed to the causal explanation of legal relations in terms of extra-legal relations face their own logical and interpretive challenges. Yet the assumption of the explanatory primacy of extra-legal relations generates a more coherent, distinctive, and useful social theory than that implied by Özsu’s interpretation of Marx. Nor does accepting the explanatory primacy of extra-legal relations make it meaningless to talk of law’s constitutive role in society. It just requires a more restrained understanding of that role.

Disciplines

Law | Law and Economics | Public Law and Legal Theory

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