WASHINGTON--Here I am--a formally dressed news reporter--surrounded by a group of people who look like a cross between Woodstock and Harvard Law School.

"Lose the tie and jacket--you'll fit in better," a student advises me.

A day later, I'm confronted by a grown man dressed in tattered jeans, red basketball shoes and an untucked "See Jane Swim" t-shirt, who says he's "in charge" of this conference.

This can't be the 11th annual Critical Legal Studies National Conference. I cannot believe the 400 or so people around me include professors who have for years bedeviled the Harvard Law School tenure process, people whom President Reagan called "a misplaced monster of prehistoric radicalism."

Despite their deceiving appearence, these blue jean-clad scholars are the root of a legal education movement which former Harvard Assistant Professor of Clare Dalton says has caused a "crisis of faith" at law schools nationwide.

Critical Legal Studies [CLS] charges that scholars cannot viewed the law objectively but must take into account the social and economic value judgements on which it is based.

But even the conference-goers admit there is no single way to describe all the CLS thought.

"I don't think there's any consensus about a goal among people who call themselves 'Crits,'" says Richard Drury, a Yale law student. "It's hard to talk about CLS as one voice."

"It's a critique of traditional legal thought and how law is made," says Pat DePace, a second-year American University law student. Traditional legal scholars "try to teach you it's like the Ten Commandments coming down from the mountain, and that it's always right. CLS people tell [you] politics of the time and the social climate have an effect on the decisions that are made. There's a lot more aspects to CLS."

"It's a very diffuse movement that consists more of themes than of precisely delineated views," says Jim G. Pope, assistant professor at Rutgers Law School. "Themes are that legal decision is a process of choice, including a value choice, and that those choices should be made in a way. That liberate people in various forms of oppression."

Although they may not agree on exactly what CLS is, Crits like Harvard Professor of Law Duncan Kennedy--who casually smokes a cigar outside of the conference--say they've put the establishment up against the wall.

"I think it's quite right for the right wing and the establishment to feel threatened, because changing the terms of the debate is bound somehow to influence legal education in a pervasive way," says Kennedy, a leading CLS scholar. "They see that changes in the terms of debate at this level are rare in the history of institutions so it's natural for them to be scared and angry."

And while CLS' incessant disputes with legal doctrine have yet to tip the scales of the bar or the practical legal establishment, Crits say they're already changing the way today's young lawyers think.

"CLS has called attention to deeply rooted value assumptions that underlie legal doctine," Pope says. The influence of CLS, he says, "will appear in the course catalog, under courses that feature 'competing visions of the law.' And we're seeing a lot of decisions with CLS slants, too, probably because clerks who had CLS in law school go on to work for judges and work on the decisions."

Changing the way legal scholars think should not be an impossible task for the Crits, since many CLS scholars hold lifetime posts at top law schools. Harvard alone has three tenured card-carrying Crits--Professor of Law Gerald Frug, Warren Professor of Legal History Morton J. Horwitz, and Kennedy--as well as several other left-leaning faculty members.