Coincidentia Oppositorum: Hybrid Networks Beyond Contract and Organization

Abstract:     
My concrete observations are about new network phenomena, how they irritate the courts and provoke the judges to juridical adventures. I will raise the question of whether restrictions in the two common ways in which the law observes its local environment - judicial and legislative reality reconstructions - systematically preclude an adequate treatment of such new social phenomena. Does the law indeed need a third mode of observing so-called 'social reality'? Business co-operation networks provide an example for the observation that this third approach cannot simply be secured through the social sciences, but is instead wholly dependent upon a unique combination of legal doctrine and reflexive social practices. I describe this 'third way' as an effort to irritate the legal system selectively with particular demands from its social environment. I still call it sociological jurisprudence, although, and rather because, this is the same form of necessary pipe-dream that is represented by a 'legal policy analysis', or by 'legal economics'. Trying to take a couple of paces along this impossible but necessary third way, I shall demonstrate how the legal qualification of networks, in particular their legal conditions and their legal consequences, can be tackled through confrontation with non-legal social reality constructs.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 22

Keywords: legal theory, system theory

JEL Classification: K10, K40

Accepted Paper Series