ABSTRACT
The starting point for Luhmann's sociological approach is always the social system consisting of communications which refer exclusively to other communications of the same kind and which construct their own meaning in this way. It is the communicated interpretation of the event by law as having meaning for law through its attribution of its binary values, lawful and unlawful, which brings it within the boundaries of the legal system and society. Jürgen Habermas argues that Luhmann separates facts from values in the way that he treats law as if it has no inherent ideological or normative content; indeed, Habermas directly defines his own legal-theoretical project as an attempt to overcome this type of legal positivism in the name of a morally substantial, sociological conception of legal validity. The status and nature of Luhmann's theory of law depends to a large extent on the way the question of his relation to positivism is answered.
