Law Commons^™

The Autonomy Of Law: Two Visions Compared, Richard O. Lempert

Book Chapters

During the past decade the effort to understand the place of the legal system in society has, in England and America, given rise to a renewed interest in the possibility of legal autonomy (Thompson, 1975; Balbus, 1973; 1977; Trubek, 1977). More recently, on the continent of Europe, especially in Germany, scholars have focused on an apparently radical form of autonomy — embodied in the idea of an autopoietic system — in an effort to understand how law functions (Luhmann, 1985 d; Teubner, 1984). These two approaches to understanding the legal system paint pictures that have much in common, but they …