201 Law in Time: Legal Theory & Legal History corporates in its narrative the way in which paradigms shape thoughts and attitudes. […] Theory of the Nature and Evolution of Law This Section outlines a theory of the nature and evolution of law with a focus on what is most germane to grand legal history. First, it addresses two aspects of the theory of law: the role of law in the ascent of human history from natural history as well as law’s irreducible willhistory-reason triadic nature. It then lays out the elementary structure7 of the evolution of law in high-complexity societies. When combined, the evolutionary schema has three concatenate parts: theory, structure, and paradigm. To reiterate, the explanandum of a theory of the nature and evolution of law is how high complexity societies achieve – when they do – social stability as constant social adaptation and axiological responsiveness through small quotidian and large occasional normative changes in what is a system of law. Without understanding of this background, grand legal history proceeds at its own explanatory peril, for to understand that background is to discern the phenomenon of law in time . A. Theory Historians operate under both explicit and implicit assumptions about the differentiation of human history from natural history. 7 Positions on matters of social ontology and causation inform, of course, the notion of “structure” as used in this Article. Here, however, is not the place to explain how so. I say only that my use of “structures” takes into account but differs from the traditional structuralism of the Saussure and Levi-Strauss tradition. For example, I am not committed to the thesis that identity is not intrinsic but determined by the whole to which an element is a part of. For a contrast, compare the use of “structure” in this Article with Justin DesautelsStein’s, Structuralist and Post-structuralist Legal History (2018) especially. Other helpful interlocutors on the nature of structures include Sally Haslanger, What is a (Social) Structural Explanation? (2016); Fred Dretske, Explaining Behavior: Reasons in aWorld of Causes (1991); Frank Jackson & Philip Pettit, Structural Explanation in Social Theory (1992); and a reconstruction of a legal theory classic in Akbar Rasulov, From Apology to Utopia and the Inner Life of International Law (2016).
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