The Emergence of the Legal Order

Abstract

I argue that the legal order is a much bigger entity than a legal system. It is not made by the highest legislative authority alone. It emerges from the decisions and actions of many participants instead of being rationally constructed by a super designer. The wider concept of the legal order embraces: the emergent legal system, all legal relations between participants who are concerned with their own legal status and a social recognition of this status, the legal professions and the methods of their education, recruitment and promotion in their service of transforming the law in books into the law in action, methods of interpretation of facts and laws and methods of argumentation in favour of some solutions of legal problems, styles of law execution, internal and external balance of legal status, living traditions and memories relevant to the emergence and implementation of the law, and last but not least, the configuration of attitudes toward the legal system. Everything that is indispensable for putting in motion the living law in action and its capacity to regulate the human behaviour will be studied as a whole. This holistic methodology requires broader concepts such as the legal order in a wide sense. My second point is that the dynamics of legal orders is driven by the wider institutional framework of the social order and by the ongoing game of interests related to the legal status of all participants.