ABSTRACT
This chapter motivates by an unease as to the way that the very idea of the law is generally understood. It finds a way of making sense of legal polycentricity in a productive way. On the other hand, critical legal theories, and here it includes most theories of legal pluralism too, see predictability and certainty as rigidity. The law as ubiquitous because its sources are to be found in all instances and contexts of people's association with each other without anyone being able to prescribe in advance where it will emerge. The basic premise of the book is that State law inevitably remains closed to meaning outside its own institutional boundaries. Perhaps this fear is also partly responsible for the monopolization of the question of the law by the expert culture of academic legal theory, which in a sense reflects the monopolization of the practice of law by the specialist caste of lawyers.
