Paulo Barrozo 210 a product of evolution” (LUHMANN, 2004) – by the end of the nineteenth century, as exemplified in the works of Holmes and Jhering. 17 The Great Manifold andThe Great Alliance paradigms set, first in legal thought and then in law, the terms for the coexistence through law of stability and change in high-complexity societies. Any successful paradigm of law must perform normative, functional, and explanatory tasks. Normatively, a paradigm must offer a vision for howwill , history , and reasonconverge in law as an axiologically legitimate institution. Functionally, a paradigm must facilitate the resolution of society’s coordination problems in directions deemed to be normatively legitimate. The explanatory task is to create the conditions of possibility for all enclosed types of legal explanation. The cumulative result of the performance of these tasks is the softening of the tension between adaptation and aspiration, thus sufficiently integrating for the relevant legal actors as well as social actors in general, the ontology, axiology, causation, authorship, concept and meaning of law through the form of law . 18 Paradigms of law are necessarily carved at a high level of abstraction. When they fly close to the ground, they do so, for example, as legal formalism. 19Starting in earnest by the end of the nineteenth century, formalism underwent relentless criticism, with each generation of jurists aiming to surpass the previous one’s anti-formalist credentials. 17 For an excellent study of legal instrumentalism in various areas of contemporary United States law and its risks and consequences, see Tamanaha (2006). 18 Much more would need to be said to show, as Habermas attempted to do, that “the normative defeatism to which both lines [action-theoretic and systems theory] of political sociology lead is not simply a result of sobering evidence but of misguided conceptual strategies as well. These strategies lose sight of what political power owes specifically to its formal constitution in legal terms.” See Habermas (1976). That is left for another context. 19 The literature on legal formalism is enormous. Sociologically, the form of law is neither desirable nor undesirable; form is the vessel in which sophisticated legal orders travel, and formalism is the attitude of the lawyers who travel with it. It is through the form of law that adaptation and value-orientation are processed together, and formalism is the attitude of legal actors that operate the processing. The formalist attitude manifests itself in a spectrum from the more reflective to the more formulaic. The only cogent critique of formalism is the critique of formulaic formalism. For fruitful studies see, in addition to other sources cited elsewhere, Frederick Schauer, Formalism (1988); Ernest J Weinrib, The idea of private law (1995); Roberto Mangabeira Unger, The Critical Legal Studies Movement (1986); Martin Stone, Formalism (2004); and Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nation: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870-1960 (2004).
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