DI ARIANNA MACERATINI
Abstract – The social system expresses, in Luhmann, a connection, endowed with meaning, of social actions, distinct from an environment of irrelevant communications: system and environment are mutually dependent and their boundary is structured as an instruction to be crossed by both sides. Communications escape any traditional temporal order: the time of systemic processes expresses the possibility of eliminating non-actualized selective opportunities, reaching irreversible situations, while maintaining these communicative possibilities as functionally equivalent alternatives, to be made explicit in decision-making through the particular function. The notion of systemic contingency leads to the identification of a communicative practice referred to the uncertainty of behavioral expectations and open to decision-making risk. The function of law consists, in fact, in the generalization and stabilization of behavioral expectations, verified a posteriori by the persistence of systemic differentiation. In this way, law exposes itself to social unknowns by contradicting its reason for existence as a differentiated system.
Keywords – Social systems – space – time – contingency – legal system.