ABSTRACT
Postmodernization and postmodernity, by contrast, raise questions about structural changes in the legal system, the legal profession, legal doctrine, transformations in the sources of legal norms, and shifts in the boundary between legal and non-legal control. Employing sociological assumptions too modern in orientation, each of the neo-evolutionist analyses of law in the welfare state not only theorize legal orders already far removed from the present, but also analyze it by reference to sociological concepts ill-suited to capturing the essential nature of contemporary social and legal change. If the lens is adjusted to see what has recently happened to the legal infrastructure of the welfare state, then the "post-welfare" paradigm becomes the appropriate conceptual inquiry. The changes cumulatively represent much more of a rupture with the past than do the transitory and ephemeral developments that characterize the normal life of legal systems.
