OJ SIMPSON: MEDIA CONSTRUCTION, HERMENEUTICS, TRUTH AND CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES

Whether you love him, pity him, have distain for him, worship him, revile him or have complete contempt for him, Orenthal James Simpson is infamous. His life provides a microcosm of how Critical Legal Studies can be used to provide a hermeneutical construction of reality. The Critical Legal Studies movement provides for a constructed or hermeneutical theory that purports to challenge accepted preemptory standards in contemporary accepted legal theory and practice. Integral to this hermeneutical theory is the notion of truth. Proponents of Critical Legal Studies indicate that the rationality and structure attributed to the law are constructed from the power relationships that exist in society and from this truth is constructed. But the Critical Legal Studies movement also promulgates that these traditional relationships may not be valid or at least that they may not have been validly considered in the past. In this paper the power that the media exercises as described by the Critical Legal Studies movement is analyzed as it relates to OJ Simpson.