Excerpt: My approach to the subject matter of this paper is one that could be subsumed under a genre that we might call the ecology of ideas. What is at issue is less the validity of ideas than the way in which they are born, circulate, take root in areas different from their place of origin and finally take on new, and sometimes unexpected, forms.

Excerpt: The debates about law as an autopoietic system bring out a number of the difficulties that arise when a general theory is transferred too directly to a limited special field. The general theory may make use of simplifications, which need not be relinquished for more concrete applications, but may need modification. This is true even when, as in the case of the theory of autopoietic systems, one is dealing with a particularly rich theory. The increased wealth of ideas for very heterogeneous fields can be attained only by means of abstraction. And this abstraction must be maintained in all applications; to do otherwise would be to abandon the theory. Nevertheless, at the same time it must be possible to account for those aspects that are not susceptible to generalization.

Excerpt: Is the practice of legal reasoning bound to end in “strange loops,” “tangled hierarchies,” and “reflexivity dilemmas” (Hofstadter, 1979: 692; 1985: 70)? Is the legal process nothing but a closed cycle of recurrent legal operations: “computation of computation of computation…” (von Foerster, 1981: 296)? And are the social dynamics of the legal system based upon the “paradoxes of self-reference” (Wormell, 1958; Quine, 1976)? Up to now, the intricate problems of self-referential relations have not been part of the discourse of lawyers; they have been discussed outside the law, in logic, linguistics, cybernetics and general systems theory. Now the theory of legal autopoiesis is importing the logic of self-referentiality into the legal world. Legal autopoiesis breaks a taboo in legal thinking – the taboo of circularity. Legal doctrine, legal theory and legal sociology have all regarded circularity as a subject not to be broached. Circular arguments have been viewed as petitio principii forbidden by the iron law of legal logic. Legal autopoiesis now presumes to invalidate this iron law by transferring circularity from the world of ideas to that of hard facts. The message is that circularity is not a flaw in legal thinking which ought to be avoided (Fletcher, 1985: 1263), but rather that the reality of law consists of a multitude of circular processes.