Afterword – A Knowledge Apart
Résumé
Speaking of Yan Thomas’s early article on La langue du droit romain, Niklas Luhmann observed that the argument was ‘not fully thought through’.¹ Given the topic of Luhmann’s own paper – law and structural coupling – it is obvious what he meant. He would have been intrigued by the proposition that Roman law ‘coded’ everyday Latin, turning it into the medium of operations that were intelligible only to those schooled in the code.² But for a theory of structural coupling there is always more to legal operations than legal operations. Luhmann’s preferred examples of the co-implication of law and collateral systems are...