For legal sociology, it is useful to conceive of the law not as a system of actions, persons, or institutions, but as a system of communications. This permits an analysis based on media theory and a consideration of the consequences of media change on legal culture.

Luhmann's Theory of Communication

Scholars commonly conceive of society as a system comprising several subsystems, such as politics, economy, religion, art, science, or law. Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) and his followers analyzed social systems as action systems. More recently, Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998) proposed to understand society and its subsystems as systems of communications. For the legal system, this means that law does not consist of lawyers, judges, plaintiffs, defendants, and their respective behavior or even courts, prisons, law libraries, and law ...

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