Gunther Teubner

Substantive and Reflexive Elements in Modern Law

The most comprehensive efforts to develop a new evolutionary approach to law are found in the work of Nonet and Selznick in the United States and Habermas and Luhmann in Germany. While these theorists are concerned with a common problem-the crisis of formal rationality of law-they differ drastically in their accounts of the problem and their vision of the future. This paper tries to resolve these differences by first decomposing and then restructuring the diverse neo-evolutionary models. Using a more comprehensive model of socio-legal covariation, the author identifies an emerging kind of legal structure which he calls reflexive law. Reflexive law is characterized by a new kind of legal self-restraint. Instead of taking over regulatory responsibility for the outcome of social processes, reflexive law restricts itself to the installation, correction, and redefinition of democratic self-regulatory mechanisms. The author identifies areas of private law in which reflexive solutions are arguably emerging, and he spells out the consequences which a concern for reflexivity has for a renewed sociological jurisprudence.

Legal Irritants: Good Faith in British Law or How Unifying Law Ends Up in New Differences

Legal irritant explains the transfer of legal rules from one country to another better than legal transplant. When a foreign rule is imposed on a domestic culture, it is not transplanted into another organism, rather it works as a fundamental irritation which triggers a whole series of new and unexpected events. It irritates laws binding arrangements with other social sectors. Legal irritants cannot be domesticated, they are not transformed from something alien into something familiar, not adapted to a new cultural context, rather they will unleash an evolutionary dynamics in which the external rules meaning will be reconstructed anew and the internal context will undergo fundamental change. As the example of the imposition of good faith on English law demonstrates, the concept of legal irritants has far-reaching consequences for the transfer of private law rules from one economic culture to the other. The imperatives of a specific Anglo-American economic culture as against a specific Continental one will bring about a fundamental reconstruction of good faith under the new conditions.

How the Law Thinks: Toward a Constructivist Epistemology of Law

I. JabberwockyII. Discourse and AutopoiesisIII. Jurgen Habermas: Intersubjectivity and ConsensusIV. Michel Foucault: Discourse and EpistemeV. Niklas Luhmann: Constructivism and AutopoiesisVI. Law - An Epistemic Subject?VII. The Epistemic TrapVIII.Escape Routes

Constitutional fragments : societal constitutionalism and globalization

1. The New Constitutional Question 2. Societal Constitutionalism in the Nation State 3. Transnational Constitutional Subjects: Regimes, Organisations, Networks 4. Transnational Constitutional Norms: Functions, Arenas, Processes, Structures 5. Transnational Constitutional Rights: Horizontal Effect 6. Colliding Constitutions

Economics of Gift — Positivity of Justice The Mutual Paranoia of Jacques Derrida and Niklas Luhmann

Niklas Luhmann and Jacques Derrida start with a common assumption in their analyses of the law and the economy - the foundational paradox of social institutions. But then autopoiesis and deconstruction move into opposite directions. Luhmann pursues the question of how de-paradoxification constructs the immanence of social institutions and builds a world of autopoietic social systems. By contrast, Derridas thought aims at the transcendence of social institutions through their re-paradoxification. However, there is a hidden supplementarity of autopoiesis and deconstruction which makes it worthwhile to relate the theories to each other. Derridas distinction of writing/speech is necessarily blind toward Luhmanns distinction of consciousness/communication, but is, at the same time, continuously provoked by it. On another level, the opposite happens. Luhmanns autopoiesis is permanently irritated by Derridas différance but is at the same time unable to conceptualize it. This complementary blindness of their distinctions directrices is a permanent source of mutual irritation which requires a reformulation of the social and of the possibility of justice.

Contracting Worlds: The Many Autonomies of Private Law

I. Il buon Governo Revisited II. Private Law in a Fragmented SocietyIII.Reconstructing Relational Contract (1) Contract as non-individual obligation (2) Contract as discursive project (3) Contract as interdiscursive translationIV. Normative Perspectives: Freedom of TranslationV. Discourse Rights in the Private Sphere

The King's Many Bodies: The Self-Deconstruction of Law's Hierarchy

The article connects two strands of the recent sociolegal debate: (1) the empirical discovery of new forms of spontaneous law in the course of globalization, and (2) the emergence of deconstructive theories of law that undermine the laws hierarchy. The article puts forward the thesis that laws hierarchy has successfully resisted all old and new attempts at its deconstruction; it breaks, however, under the pressures of globalization that produced a global law without the state, as self-created law of global society that has no institutionalized support whatsoever in international politics and public international law. Consequently, the article criticizes deconstructive theories for their lack of autological analysis. These theories do not take into account the historical conditions of deconstruction. Accordingly, deconstructive analysis of law would have to look for new legal distinctions that are plausible under the new conditions of a doubly fragmented global society. The article sketches the contours of an emerging polycontextural law.

Changing Maps: Empirical Legal Autopoiesis

Superficially at odds with the idea of empirical research, autopoiesis is shown on closer study to demand a fundamental reconsideration of the empirico-theoretical relationship. This idea is developed firstly in the context of a possible methodology and secondly in the application of that methodology to a particular regulatory situ ation. The aim is to arrive at a more adequately complex understanding of the regu latory process - as well as of the process of legal sociological research itself.

Globale Zivilverfassungen: Alternativen zur staatszentrierten Verfassungstheorie

In einem spektakulären Prozeß versucht eine Gruppe von Globalisierungsgegnern, mit der Berufung auf die Meinungsfreiheit den Zugang zu einer Einrichtung des Internet gerichtlich zu erzwingen. Sie verklagt einen kommerziellen host provider, der auf seinen vernetzten Rechnern content providers die Möglichkeit anbietet, websites zu errichten. Seit längerem war der host provider schon in das Fadenkreuz von Staatsanwälten und privaten Sammelklägern geraten, da einige der websites Kinderpornographie und Nazipropaganda enthielten. Reagieren musste der provider zum einen auf die Entscheidung des Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris, Beschluß vom 20. November 2000, wonach Yahoo Inc. den Zugang zu Versteigerungen von Naziobjekten für französische Nutzer sperren muß. Zum anderen reagierte der host provider auf neuere Trends zur öffentlich-privaten Co-regulierung des Internet in Europa und den Vereinigten Staaten, welche die Haftung des provider von seiner Kooperation mit staatlichen Instanzen abhängig machen. Darauf sperrt der provider mit elektronischen Mitteln alle die websites, für die er das Prozessrisiko strafrechtlicher oder zivilrechtlicher Natur als zu hoch einschätzt. Von der Sperre sind auch als radikal eingestufte politische Gruppierungen betroffen. Mit einer Zivilklage versucht die Gruppe der Globalisierungsgegner nun, den Zugang zu den websites des host provider zu erzwingen. Der Fall bündelt wie in einem Brennglas eine Fülle von fundamentalen Problemen, welche die Digitalisierung der Kommunikation aufwirft. Nicht nur technische juristische Fragen einer Prüfungspflicht für private provider, einer Zensur mißliebiger Inhalte durch Private, eines Aufnahmeanspruchs in verschieden Einrichtungen des Internet, der Geltung und Durchsetzung nationaler Normen im transnationalen Internet und der Drittwirkung von Grundrechten im cyberspace stehen zur Debatte. Vielmehr stellt sich die grundsätzlichere Frage eines universalen politischen Zugangsrechts zur digitalen Kommunikation, letztlich aber das Problem der Exklusion aus globalen Kommunikationsvorgängen. Im Hintergrund steht die Theoriefrage, ob es in der Entwicklungslogik funktionaler Differenzierung liegt, daß sich den binären Codes der globalen Funktionssysteme die Differenz von Inklusion/Exklusion überordnet. Wird Inklusion/Exklusion zum Metacode des 21. Jahrhunderts, der alle anderen Codes mediatisiert, zugleich aber die funktionale Differenzierung selbst untergräbt und mit der Brisanz des Ausschlusses ganzer Bevölkerungsgruppen andere gesellschaftspolitische Probleme dominiert?

In the Blind Spot: The Hybridization of Contracting

What are the consequences of modernity for the institution of contracting? As the unity of the traditional contract is dissolved into a multiplicity of separate contracting worlds (economic transaction, legal promise, productive agreement), the binding force of contracting needs to be reformulated from an interpersonal to an interdiscursive relation. The central thesis of this Article is that the unity of contracting is hidden in the blind spot of the distinction between contracting worlds. Contracting needs two diametrically contradictory but complementary theories which cannot be integrated into a synthesis. As demonstrated with the example of the expertise contract, the subtle interplay of different contracting worlds depends basically on a fragile symmetry of chances of translation. The normative correlate of contract understood as translation between different worlds of meaning would be an extension of constitutional rights into the context of private governance regimes.