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The King's Many Bodies: The Self-Deconstruction of Law's Hierarchy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Gunther Teubner
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Abstract

The article connects two strands of the recent sociolegal debate: (1) the empirical discovery of new forms of spontaneous law in the course of globalization, and (2) the emergence of deconstructive theories of law that undermine the law's hierarchy. The article puts forward the thesis that law's hierarchy has successfully resisted all old and new attempts at its deconstruction; it breaks, however, under the pressures of globalization that produced a global law without the state, as self-created law of global society that has no institutionalized support whatsoever in international politics and public international law. Consequendy, the article criticizes deconstructive theories for their lack of autological analysis. These theories do not take into account the historical conditions of deconstruction. Accordingly, deconstructive analysis of law would have to look for new legal distinctions that are plausible under the new conditions of a doubly fragmented global society. The article sketches the contours of an emerging polycontextural law.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 31 , Issue 4 , 1997 , pp. 763 - 787
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 by The Law and Society Association

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Footnotes

For critical comments I would like to thank Lindsay Farmer, Nicola Lacey, Tim Murphy, Alan Pottage and Anton Schütz.

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