This essay serves a dual purpose. It is first a discussion of the challenges posed to law partly by its increasing dependence on specialised knowledgebased discourses and technologies and partly by the changes in governance and legislation due to the new formations of multi-level governance. Secondly it is a presentation of the politico-legal and socio-legal theories of Jürgen Habermas, Niklas Luhmann, Gunther Teubner and also to some extent Michel Foucault – which are all being used in the understanding of these challenges to law. The emphasis here will be on the contributions of Habermas and Luhmann to politico-legal theories concerning the understanding of the new forms of governance and of Luhmann and Teubner to socio-legal theory concerning the understanding of the increasing dependence in law on knowledgebased discourses.
Changing forms of governance and the role of law - society and its law
What remains of the basis of law in societies of increasingly knowledge-based and internationalised systems of governance? This paper discusses such questions in the light of different theoretical positions.
ARENA Working Paper 14/2000 (html)
Inger Johanne Sand
Published Nov. 9, 2010 10:52 AM