ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses an inventory of key notions: the key analytical distinction between operations and observations, and that between communication and action, the notions of complexity and contingency, and of coding and programming. It looks at what systems theory takes to be the function of law, and then explores more concretely 'how the law thinks', to use Gunther Teubner's famous formulation. The term 'autopoiesis' was borrowed by German social theorist Niklas Luhmann from biology and introduced to help understand social systems. A social system is autopoietic in that it produces and reproduces its own elements, new communications from a network of existing communications. Operations are communications about system and environment, internal and external reference, therefore observation. Systems observe by introducing a guiding difference and by making the world relevant to this guiding difference. Semantic codes specify the differences which form the basis for something to be received as information.
