Law Commons^™

Autopoiesis And The 'Relative Autonomy' Of Law, Hugh Baxter

Faculty Scholarship

Recent accounts of the relation between law and other social spheres have emphasized law's "relative autonomy." The intuition behind the "relative autonomy" formula is that law is neither wholly independent of, nor entirely reducible to, political, economic and other social processes. Sensible as this intuition is, however, the idea of "relative autonomy" by itself remains purely negative. It excludes two unpalatable extremes – pure formalism and pure instrumentalism – but it does not by itself characterize, in positive theoretical terms, the relation between law and other social discourses or practices.

This Article examines an attempt in recent German social thought …