1 Is the Legal System a System? 1
2 Why Do Judges Talk the Way they Do? 26
Social Systems, Psychic Systems and Redundancy 28
Judicial Communications and ‘Commitment’ to the Legal System 34
Judicial Discretion 46
Conclusion 55
3 Can One Have a Right to Disobey a Law? 58
Civil Disobedience within the Legal System 61
Civil Disobedience within the Political System 70
Social Movements and Civil Disobedience 79
Civil Disobedience within the Legal and Political Systems -A Case Study （Debbie Purdy’s Case） 82
Conclusion 86
4 Understanding Legal Pluralism 88
Brian Tamanaha’s Criticisms of Systems Theory 91
How Does One Identify a Subsystem Code? 99
Law and Violence 102
Normative Pluralism 105
Pluralism and Translation 115
Exploring Legal Pluralism in Modern and Pre-modern Societies 119
Conclusion 128
5 How Law Constructs Time 131
Time, Law and Politics 138
A Simple Example: The Presumption of Innocence 145
A Complex Example 147
6 Politics and Law: The Rule of Law, Constitutional Law, and Human Rights 164
The Rule of Law 165
Constitutional Law 184
Constitutional and Human Rights, and Societal Constitutionalism 195
7 Control through Law 207
Steering through Constituting Rules 210
Observing Reflexive Law 216
Structural Coupling Dynamics 224
8 Appeals in Law 229
Appeals and Doctrine 230
The Structural Coupling between Law and the Media through Conviction 237
Implications of Criminal Appeals for the Structural Coupling between Law and the Media 241
The Pressures Generated by the Differences between the Media and the Legal System’s Understanding of Appeal 245
Postscript: A Comment on Human Involvement 250
Bibliography 255
Index 269