ABSTRACT
Law is nothing else than social and other norms that have been upgraded and adopted by the legal system. Thus, the norms contained in the legal system (substratum) are not produced by the legal system itself, but by other social sub-systems. Once the law has contributed to formulating the social, political or economic norm, it gains its own legal definition, partly independent of its source. In being a system with its own unique construction and way of operating, the law contributes partly to re-formulate and change the content of the norm.
The legal norm is not the same as a social norm. Legal rules linked to interactive processes are the result of the responses of the involved actors and reflect their spontaneous needs in the form of agreements and contracts, while top-down norms are created within a political decision process in the form of laws. Legal rules are distributed across the action systems we mentioned in the previous chapter. They are actualized when the action system in the relevant case has not managed to solve its internal problems, and so the legal system takes over and defines the form of logic that will be applied to resolve the dispute.
