Superficially at odds with the idea of empirical research, autopoiesis is shown on closer study to demand a fundamental reconsideration of the empirico-theoretical relationship. This idea is developed firstly in the context of a possible methodology and secondly in the application of that methodology to a particular regulatory situ ation. The aim is to arrive at a more adequately complex understanding of the regu latory process – as well as of the process of legal sociological research itself.

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.

Excerpt: Am Beispiel von Recht und Organisation soll die Konstruktion des Hyperzyklus erprobt werden. Typische Strukturmerkmale des Rechts, besonders die Positivität des modernen Rechts, ebenso wie herausragende Merkmale formaler Organisation, besonders die Abgehobenheit der Organisation gegenüber ihrem Personenbestand und gegenüber inhaltlichen Festlegungen lassen sich aus der hyperzyklischen Verkettung von Systemkomponenten erklären. Darüberhinaus sollte die Konstruktion trennscharfe Kriterien für Rechtstypen unterschiedlichen Autonomisierungsgrades liefern. Ebenso müßte es gelingen, damit der Unterscheidung von Interaktion, Gruppe und Organisation neue Aspekte abzugewinnen. Und schließlich soll die Konstruktion etwas zur Erklärung der Evolution von Recht und Organisation beisteuern. Die historische Autonomisierung des Rechtsdiskurses ebenso wie die allmähliche kollektive und korporative Verfestigung der Organisation müßten sich als Steigerung von selbstreferentiellen Verhältnissen, kumulierend in ihrer hyperzyklischen Verkettung, darstellen lassen.

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.

Key words: legal autopoiesis, legal alienation, re-entry of the extra-legal, co-evolution of law and social production regimes, legal person