Mark Tushnet, for example, argued that the Law and Society Movement "ignored the ideological functions of law" and saw law as simply molded by society. [Mark Tushnet, "Perspectives on the Development of American Law: A Critical Review of Friedman’s ‘A History of American Law’," 1977 Wis. L. Rev. 81, 83]

David Trubek offers a critical evaluation suggesting that law and Society studies are often premised on "[t]he idea of a legal order ... [that] is similar to Weber's concept of formally rational modern law ... [it stands for] the view that four conditions prevail in a society. First, the law is in some sense a system, that is, a body of concepts (‘doctrine’) that, properly interpreted, provides an answer to all questions about social behavior (including the answer that the law does not affect that behavior). Second, a form of reasoning exists that can be employed by specialists to generate necessary answers from doctrine. Third, this doctrine reflects a coherent view about the basic relations between persons and about the nature of society; Finally, to a significant degree, social action reflects norms generated by the legal system, either because the actors internalize these legal norms, or because threats or actual coercion forces the actors to abide by them."

CLS scholars, in turn, provide a "critique of legal order ... [that] ... challenges the idea that a legal order exists in any society. The critique is based on four principles: indeterminacy, antiformalism, contradiction, and marginality. First, the critics assert that while there is clearly a body of stuff that we can call legal doctrine, it is not a ‘system.’ The doctrine neither provides a determinant answer to questions nor covers all conceivable situations. This is the principle of indeterminacy. Second, the critics reject the idea that there is an autonomous and neutral mode of ‘legal’ reasoning and rationality through which legal specialists apply doctrine in concrete cases to reach results that are independent of the specialists’ ethical ideals and political purposes. This is the principle of antiformalism. Third, the critics reject the view that the doctrine contains a single, coherent, and justifiable view of human relations; rather, they see the doctrine as reflecting two or even more different and often competing views, no one of which is either coherent or pervasive enough to be called dominant. This is the principle of contradiction. Finally, the critics note that even under those circumstances in which a consensus can be formed about the norms of the law, there is no reason to believe that the law as such often or even frequently is a decisive factor in social behavior. This is the principle of marginality.

The critique of legal order presents a challenge to legal scholarship. If law is indeterminate, all scholarship on what the law is becomes a form of advocacy rather than a "neutral" or "scientific" activity. If there is no distinct from of legal reasoning, scholarly argumentation about the law blends into political and ideological debate. If the stuff of legal doctrine is, by its nature, contradictory, then legal argumentation can find no grounding in the materials of law itself. Given good advocates and argumentation limited to material in the doctrine, all lawsuits and scholarly debates about the law should end in a tie. And if law is marginal, then whatever normative arrangements govern social life must be worked out extralegally, or, at best, ‘in the shadow of the law.’ Moreover, since law is indeterminate, contradictory, and a part of political and ideological debate and struggle, ‘law’ itself is not something hard but rather an obscure and vague source of normative guidance. The law, in whose shadow we bargain, is itself a shadow."

CLS scholarship is thus premised on the understanding that "[i]f law and society are mutually constituting, then the distinction between law and society breaks down. This distinction, like that between a ‘public’ and a ‘private realm,’ is another product of hegemony and of reification. And if law and society are mutually constituting, there is no a priori barrier to the success of a transformative politics that employs the methods of critique and what Unger calls ‘deviationist doctrine.’ Critique can create the possibility for imagining new forms of social relations and for deriving a utopian vision from the core of truth in our current legal consciousness. Deviationist doctrine can carry forward that effort by reconstructing the core and moving beyond our current understanding of what is possible and desirable in our institutional arrangements." [David M. Trubek, "Where the Action Is: Critical Legal Studies and Empiricism (Critical Legal Studies Symposium), 36 Stan. L. Rev. 575, 577-579, 609-610 (1984)].