ABSTRACT
A hallmark of heterodox legal scholarship is to link legal argument to an epistemic community. Any number of thematic moves in tension emerge – for instance, law structures power but also formalizes power, or law is an arrangement of argumentative technique but its reasoning is indeterminate. As a discourse (language) or institutionalized practice (routines) of discrete identifiable communities, a common scholarly agenda is to apply a cross disciplinary lens to better understand some context of what is law: anthropological, historical, social, and so forth. For all the talk on the language, the materiality, the personality of law, there is a surprising lack of interest in the study of law’s ‘form’, which the paper takes up in two respects. First, its written, printed embodiment, and second, its sequence within a given communicative loop. In doing so, the paper introduces the reader to analytical techniques from cybernetics and family systems therapy, and foregrounds this emphasis in a concrete circumstance: a workshop aimed at producing an edited volume about how under-appreciated (almost) ‘non-legal’ dynamics shape international law.
