Between Autonomy and Pluralism: Conceptual and Communicative Problems in World Law

This thesis aims to describe and analyse legality in the context of world society, characterised by functional differentiation and legal pluralism, by developing a sociologically informed, second-order observational account of how the legal system maintains its autonomy, stabilises expectations, and processes inter-systemic conflicts through the phenomenon of inter-legality and the mechanisms of legal reasoning. This thesis asks: how does the legal system maintain its autonomy in the face of the plural and paradoxical conditions of world society? Through the review of specialised literature on the subject of the autonomy of law, the plurality of legalities and the conflicts they entail, I offer a selective reading of the predominant discourses in legal philosophy, as they describe the closure of the legal system and its relationship with other forms of knowledge. Analysing the contributions of systems theorists such as Niklas Luhmann, Gunther Teubner and Marcelo Neves, I offer an answer to the challenges of inter-legality developing Luhmann's later complement to his first functionalist theory, the structural elements in the form of conditional programs and structural couplings. Presenting them as important structural elements of legality in the context of modernity, which force the inter-legalist to nuance their claims.