THE KINGS MANY BODIES - THE SELF-DECONSTRUCTION OF LAWS HIERARCHY

The article connects two strands of the recent sociolegal debate: (1) the empirical discovery of new forms of spontaneous law in the course of globalization, and (2) the emergence of deconstructive theories of law that undermine the law's hierarchy. The article puts forward the t hesis that law's hierarchy has successfully resisted all old and new a ttempts at its deconstruction; it breaks, however, under the pressures of globalization that produced a global law without the state, as sel f-created law of global society that has no institutionalized support whatsoever in international politics and public international law. Con sequently, the article criticizes deconstructive theories for their la ck of autological analysis. These theories do not take into account th e historical conditions of deconstruction. Accordingly, deconstructive analysis of law would have to look for new legal distinctions that ar e plausible under the new conditions of a doubly fragmented global soc iety. The article sketches the contours of an emerging polycontextural law.