What can sociology contribute to modern legal theory? This was one of the central questions that continued to preoccupy Niklas Luhmann, the great sociologist who also held a law degree and was a former civil servant, throughout his scholarly career.

Now his book, Contingency and the Law, written presumably in 1971 and almost completed, offers a captivating glimpse of Luhmann’s first attempt to provide an answer to this question.

Luhmann shows how the clarification of the premises of a sociology of law, as formulated by systems theory, allows for a thoroughgoing reinterpretation of established problems in jurisprudence. At the centre of this ambitious undertaking stands the concept of contingency, the basic fact of the existence of alternative possibilities in social intercourse and the resultant uncertainty in the formation of expectations, which make the law necessary. A systems theoretical legal theory no longer sees the productivity of the law in terms of its ability to combat injustice but rather in its ability to generalise and thus make the coordination of more highly complex constellations of justice/injustice, and hence a more complex social reality possible. From this perspective, the function of the law lies in the counterfactual stabilisation of the expectation of expectations.

Contingency and the Law not only shows that Luhmann was fully conversant with the juridical debates of his time, but also demonstrates the heuristic value of contingency theory in affording a perspective that can get away from juridical dogma.

Power in the System