Communication, Niklas Luhmann, and the Fragmentation Debate in International Law
Friedrich Kratochwil
This chapter offers a critical examination of Niklas Luhmann’s “systems” approach for our understanding of law. Although law has been traditionally understood as a system of rules or norms, Luhmann’s emphasis on autopoiesis and on...
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See Niklas Luhmann, “Operational Closure and Structural Coupling: The Differentiation of the Legal System,” Cardozo Law Review 13.5 (1992): 1419–1441, 1422.

Niklas Luhmann, Soziale Systeme (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 92ff.

John Austin, DOng The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, ed. H. L. A. Hart (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1954).

See H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961).

Hans Kelsen, Reine Rechtslehre, ed. (Vienna: Deuticke, 1960).

Lon Fuller, The Morality of Law, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969).

See Ronald Dworkin, “Hard Cases,” in Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975).

For a restatement of Dworkin’s position, see Ronald Dworkin, Justice in Robes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

For an incisive critique of this approach based on cognitive psychology, see James Davis, Terms of Inquiry (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

See Jeremy Bentham’s remark on the need to subject such questions to “phraseoplerosis” instead of defining it per genus et differentiam. This would involve how it works within a “sentence” and how it links to other concepts. Jeremy Bentham, “Duty of the Supreme Power to Make Laws,” in A Fragment on Government, ed. J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 106–114.

For a discussion of this fallacy in regard to “sovereignty,” see Wouter Werner and Jaap de Wilde, “The Endurance of Sovereignty,” European Journal of International Relations 7.3 (2001): 283–313.

H. L. A Hart, “Definition and Theory in Jurisprudence,” Law Quarterly Review 70 (1954): 37–60.

This point was powerfully made (even though it did not receive the attention it deserved) by Nicholas Onuf, Legal Theory: Law Making in the Global Community (Durham: North Carolina Academic Press, 1982).

J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975).

For an elaboration of this point, see my “Ten Points to Ponder about Pragmatism,” in Pragmatism in International Relations, ed. Hans Bauer and Elisbetta Brighi (London: Routledge, 2009), 11–25. See also Joerg Friedrichs and Friedrich Kratochwil, “On Acting and Knowing: How Pragmatism Can Advance International Relations Research and Methodology,” International Organization 63.3 (2009): 701–731.

See, for example, Rene Descartes, “Second Meditation,” in Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1959).

Dong Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 6, Chapter 5, trans. J. A. K. Thomson (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1955), 176.

See Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (New York: Washington Square, 1967).

Richard Muench, “Autopoiesis by Definition,” Cardozo Law Review 13.5 (1991/92): 1463–1471, 1464.

Gunther Teubner, “The Two Faces of Janus: Rethinking Legal Pluralism,” Cardozo Law Review 13.5 (1991/1992): 1443–1462, 1445.

Bronislaw Malinowski, Crime and Custom in Savage Society (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1926).

See Karl Llewellyn, The Bramble Bush, repr. 1930 (New York: Oceana, 1960).

Leopold Pospisil, Kapauku, Papuans and Their Law (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958).

See, for example, Brian Tamanaha, Understanding Law in Micronesia: An Interpretive Approach to Transplanted Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Toward a New Common Sense, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002).

John Griffiths, “What Is Legal Pluralism,” Journal of Legal Pluralism 24.1 (1986): 1–55, 50.

Sally Moore, “Law and Social Change: The Semi-autonomous Social Field as an Appropriate Subject of Study,” Law and Society Review 7.4 (1973): 719–746.

Karl N. Llewellyn, “The Normative, the Legal, and the Law-Jobs: The Problem of Juristic Method,” Yale Law Journal 49.8 (1940): 1355–1400.

Gunther Teubner, “How the Law Thinks: Towards a Constructivist Epistemology of Law,” Law and Society Review 23.5 (1989): 727–757.

Max Weber, Dong Gesammelte Schriften zur Wissenschaftslehre, ed. Johannes Winckelmann (Tuebingen: Mohr, 1973).

Paul Bohannan, Justice and Judgement among the Tiv (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957).

Max Gluckman, The Judicial Process among the Barotse (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1955).

Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

Tamanaha espouses a “nonessential legal pluralism” that he contrasts with Teubner’s approach. While he considers law to be “whatever people identify and treat to their practices as law”——basically opting for a “folk” version of law——but then wants to move to “second level constructs” that help us identify phenomena to which the label “law” has been conventionally attached. Of course this is the $10,000 question that legal pluralists have not satisfactorily answered, despite a turn from a largely anthropological analysis of law to perspective informed by general jurisprudence. See Brian Tamanaha, A General Jurisprudence of Law and Society(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 194–195.

Niklas Luhmann, Oekololgische Kommunikation (Opladen, Germany: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986), 24, 126.

Niklas Luhmann, “The Unity of the Legal System,” in Autopoietic Law, ed. Gunther Teubner (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988), 12–36, 20.

Tony Honore, Making Law Bind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 75.

For some further thoughts along this line, see Scott Brewer, “Exemplary Reasoning: Semantics, Pragmatics, and the Rational Force of Legal Argument by Analogy,” Harvard Law Review 109.5 (1996): 925–1028.

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1978/79, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

See, for example, Martti Koskenniemi and Paivi Leino, “Fragmentation of International Law? Postmodern Anxieties,” Leiden Journal of International Law 15.3 (2002): 553–579.

See, for example, Bardo Fassbender, “The United Nations Charter as the Constitution of the International Community,” Columbia Journal of Transnational Law 36.3 (1998): 529–619.

See also Jan Klabbers, Ann Peters, and Geir Ulfstein, The Constitutionalization of International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).

See Friedrich Kratochwil, The Puzzles of Politics (London: Routledge, 2011), 64–80.

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Octagon Books, 1975).

Michael Bratman, Faces of Intention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

These criteria were elaborated by Hume and later popularized by Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).

See Sanjeev Khagram, James Riker, and Kathryn Sikkink, Restructuring World Politics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).

See Khagram, Riker, and Sikkink, Restructuring World Politics, 3–23; Rodney Bruce Hall and Thomas J. Biersteker, eds., The Emergence of Private Authority in Global Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

See, for example, the critical remarks by Andreas Paulus in his Commentary to Andreas Fischer-Lescano and Gunther Teubner’s “The Legitimacy of International Law and the Role of the State,” Michigan Journal of International Law 25.4 (2004): 1047–1058, 1050.

See also Gunther Teubner, “Jus Cogens between Hegemony and Fragmentation: An Attempted Re-appraisal,” Nordic Journal of International Law 74.1 (2005): 297–333.

Martti Koskenniemi, “The Fate of Public International Law: Between Technique and Politics,” Modern Law Review 70.1 (2007): 1–30, 12.

Teubner uses the example of this province of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire suggesting that now something of a global Bukowina is in the offing. See Gunther Teubner, Globale Bukowina: Zur Emergenz eines transnationalen Rechtsapluralismus (Basel: Europa Institut der Universitaet Basel Schriften zur Europaeischen Integration No. 21, 1996).

John Myer, John Boli, George Thomas, and Francisco Ramirez, “World Society and the Nation State,” American Journal of Sociology 103.1 (1997): 144–181.

For a discussion of these issues see Joost Pauwelyn, Conflict of Norms in Public International Law: How WTO Law Relates to Other Rules of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

See, for example, the recent Kadi Case before the ECJ where human rights “trumped” the obligations under Art 103 UNCH concerning the enforcement of the measures taken by the Security Council under Chapter VII, while the court of first instance had come to the contrary conclusions. For a discussion of the 2005 cases before the European Court of Justice, see Pasquale De Sena and Maria Chiara Vitucci, “The European Courts and the Security Council: Between Dedoublement Fonctionnel and Balancing of Values,” European Journal of International Law 20 (2009): 193–223.

See Bruno Simma and Dirk Pulkowski, “Of Planets and the Universe: Self-contained Regimes in International Law,” European Journal of International Law 17.3 (2006): 483–529.

For a discussion and documentation of the Beef Hormone cases, see Renee Johnson and Charles Hanrahan, The US-EU Beef Hormone Dispute (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2010).

While the ICJ reiterated its more restrictive interpretation of the “control” standard in its recent decision in Bosnia and Herzegovina v Serbia (February 26, 2007) this does not mean that other tribunals will follow this lead. For a discussion, see Nikolas Rajkovic, “Of Bad Law and Good Politics,” Leiden Journal of International Law 21.4 (2008): 885–910.

See John Myer and Brian Rowan, “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structures as Myths and Ceremony,” American Journal of Sociology 83.2 (1977): 340–363.

See, for example, Kenneth W. Abbott, Robert O. Keohane, Andrew Moravcsik, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Duncan Snidal, “The Concept of Legalization,” International Organization 54.3 (2000): 401–419.

Gunther Teubner and Andreas Fischer-Lescano, “Regime Collisions: The Vain Search for Legal Unity in the Fragmentation of Global Law,” Michigan Journal of International Law 25.4 (2004): 999–1046, 1004.

Georges Abi-Saab, “Fragmentation or Unification: Some Concluding Remarks,” New York University Journal of International Law and Politics 31.4 (1999): 919–933, 926.

Imre Lakatos, “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programs,” in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (Cambridge:: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 91–196.