Paulo Barrozo 212 paradigm of law must incorporate a hermeneutic of normative practices from the viewpoint of social actors, and thus constantly recreating law both as the foundation and as the apex of normative praxis. It may be helpful now to inventory the static and dynamic features of the theory of legal evolution outlined in this Article. • Legal systems of high-complexity societies are composed of elements that are integrated from the viewpoint of relevant legal actors by functional, axiological, formal, and hierarchical considerations. • Legal systems are ceaselessly under attack by functional and axiological pressures that create risks of social destabilization. Risks of destabilization refer to adaptive or axiological factors that cannot be accommodated without normative change – small or large – in the relevant area of the legal system. Lack of normative change in such cases may generate anomaly, inefficiency, illegitimacy or unresponsiveness that can accumulate or degenerate into destabilization crisis potentially reaching the level of social change as social instability. • Paradigms of law are structuring conditions of legal action and thought, and legal actors reproduce the structure by thinking through it and by acting it out in the world. In the domain of law, paradigm is structuring because it holds the capacity to intellectually integrate will, history and reason at the enclosing-diachronic level of explanation, which generates descending levels of explanation to the enclosedsynchronic level of everyday doctrine. In worldly sites of legal production, interpretation and enforcement, paradigms of law allow legal actors ordinarily to weave together, in the small confines of their roles, adaptive and axiological responsiveness in ways that are sufficiently efficient and ethically appealing. This process collectively and routinely stabilizes legal systems that are under constant risk of social destabilization. Legal history plays an important role in this process of stabilization. • The greater a destabilization risk, the higher up in the hierarchy of formal sources and further up in the modes of
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