ABSTRACT
The era that began in the 1960s and continues today is characterized by an epistemological crisis. There is no longer an acceptable meta-discourse that determines what is law. From another direction, there is a rich discourse about what is law, a meta-discourse which has not existed before, and thus, there is not a consensual representation of what was obvious and common sense-like before. There are many perceptions of law, many histories; there are many 'law and ... ' trends, and the flourishing of the meta-discourse about what is law is becoming a primary intellectual affair. Some call this era 'postmodem', but this labeling usually already assumes a way to remain 'modem' without confronting the many problematics and contradictions in the liberal discourse, and in modernity itself. It assumes an era where modernism was 'ruling' with no reservations, as in the 1950s, but this depiction of the 'origin', as always, and as already shown in the previous chapter, 1 is itself a matter of having a perspective and a location within the intellectual realm of today. This chapter seeks to map briefly, and by way of examples, three diverse responses to the 1950s jurisprudence, and through the examples to delineate also the loss of the theoretical interest in the dispute and in the public notion of settlement.
