Alienating Justice: On the Social Surplus Value of the Twelfth Camel
LAW'S NEW BOUNDARIES: CONSEQUENCES OF LEGA AUTOPOIESIS, David Nelken, Jiri Priban, eds., Ashgate, London, pp. 21-44, 2001
15 Pages Posted: 24 Jan 2006 Last revised: 3 Sep 2009
Abstract
Taking Niklas Luhmann's essay on the Return of the twelfth camel as a starting point, the article deals with some major consequences of legal autopoiesis, but shifts the focus from law's internal self-reference to the external relations of law to society. It uses the idea of re-entry by Spencer Brown to analyse the problematic relation between the legal and the extra-legal. Consequence is a multiple alienation of law from its social origins. In this perspective the article begins to redefine four topics of social theory of law: the role of legal argument in litigation, the co-evolution of law and social production regimes, the potential of the social sciences in legal reality constructs, and the reconstruction of collective actors, particularly of the new ecological actants, in the legal discourse.
Keywords: legal autopoiesis, legal alienation, re-entry of the extra-legal, co-evolution of law and social production regimes, legal person
JEL Classification: K10, K40
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation