ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the nature of autopoietic systems, what is required is a methodology that can identify the multitude of elementary acts that constitute the autopoietic closure of the various processes involved. It develops there is accordingly a very close relationship between the map metaphor and the notion of an autopoietic system as a path-dependent evolutionary system. Heinz Ladeur himself notes that the legal system in particular must be oriented towards uncertainty and must remove itself from the central position it assumes that it occupies. What autopoiesis allows, however, is a second-order observation, an investigation of what it is that each system can see and equally what it is that it cannot – what is behind the mask that each system creates by its very operation and observation. Law's self-steering may produce a perturbation in the system it seeks to regulate but it is not a direct effect.
