Niklas Luhmann

"Niklas Luhmann: Law, Society, Justice" is a critical description, and at the same time a performative inversion, of the theory of legal autopoiesis as developed by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. This theory is introduced here both in terms of society at large and the legal system specifically. As the basic operations and mechanisms of Luhmannian sociological analysis of the law are used as a platform on which the critical analysis of the book is erected, the work reveals the aporetic structure of autopoiesis. This aligns it with postmodern approaches to law as influenced by post-structuralism, deconstruction, feminist theories, contemporary philosophy and political theory.The main epistemological inversion is that, here, the systemic environment - whatever is not 'of the system' - becomes a space of critique and negation of the existing systemic structures, but only after its prior internalization by the system itself. Thus, through autopoietic processes, the environment advances from outside in, and in this transgressive performance, an autopoietic critique of the structure emerges. The book builds on this transgression and reconstructs the theory malgre soi on the basis of a paradox, where the observer is required to look outside the law in order to find an adequate description of the law. "Niklas Luhmann: Law, Society, Justice" thus operates both as an introduction to the relevance of Luhmann's social theory for law, as well as a critical response to autopoiesis.