Volume 30, Issue 1

The relationship of private rules, non-governmental standards and (state) law, a classical subject of the sociology of law, is of particular relevance, also from an international perspective, in medical and healthcare systems. The development of standards within the medical profession, in the form of guidelines, directives and recommendations, is of great importance in this context, reflecting several overlapping and partly conflicting strands of development, e.g. processes of scientification, of internal self-regulation within the profession and of external regulation of medical practice. The increased importance of professional norm generation stands in contrast to a deficit of knowledge regarding their normative qualification and empirical relevance. Acceptance and implementation within the profession and legal reception are at present in an instable state of suspension. The status and effect of relevant rules are problematic while processes of standard setting are to some extent intransparent. It is therefore time for an interdisciplinary socio-legal analysis of the development and validity of this type of “non-law”.

From a legal-scientific point of view it is under the conditions of rule of law exclusively and ultimately upon courts to decide on disputes. The issue of effects of court decisions is hence understood as the inner-procedural operations which - if no mutually consented agreement can be found - have to result in a legally binding and enforceable judicial decision. For a legal-sociological perception the scope of possible effects is broader. Court decisions have increasingly effects beyond the institutional and legal framework of the individual proceedings and enter general judicial, political and other public discourses. The transcending of court rooms may have mainly three causes. Court proceedings may deliberately have been launched to achieve goals which are not spelled out in the code of procedure, e. g. social rehabilitation or satisfaction or public awareness. Occasionally courts have their own interest in sending out judicial messages be it in the form of obiter dicta, be it in drawing public attention to certain cases by press releases on chosen judgments or conferences or legal scientific commenting in law journals. Finally, the media play a crucial role selecting certain judicial matters and cases and translating them into discourses on justice and fairness in the society. In sum, courts and judges have increasingly engaged in contributing to public deliberation on values and norms and to general discourses.

The article concerns the variety of impacts a contract may have, demonstrated by a widely used franchising contract of a coffee shop chain. It explicitly stipulates enforceable obligations on e.g. pricing and services. However, some of the contract’s details aim at impacts not obvious to the franchisee, for instance the promotion and strengthening of the corporate identity by the agents involved in the supply chain.

My argumentation is threefold: In the first place it is asked to what extent social systems like the law can learn for the future. According to the understanding of learning processes proposed here any such process starts with an irritation. An irritation confronts a system’s information processing with problems it could not solve so far. In this way social systems may learn for the future. They do not have to wait for an irritation; they may even search for it. In the law this can be done by procedures of prospective legal assessment (pGFA). But the argument cannot end here. Secondly, the thesis is put forward that, like any other system, the legal system has to face the conditions of coevolution: Learned structures will have to be re-stabilised in an environment which itself is modified by other systems’ evolution and learning. If that holds true, which is the third and last argument, the problem we are dealing with is about the evolutionary chances of retention (re-stabilisation). For prospective law this means that what is important is not so much the participation of as many relevant actors as possible but rather to think about such a procedure in the light of its end: What may attract other co-evolving and co-learning systems to select learned structures? The chances of retention are by no way left to chance alone, as is indicated especially Luhmann’s theory of social evolution.

The paper analyzes the concept of restorative justice in theory and its adaptation to the Northern Irish context. From the perspective of the sociology of violence and the sociology of law the restorative justice approach is of particular importance for post-conflict societies since typically, post-war periods are highly affected by violence, mostly criminal violence. They are periods in which a process of conflict transformation has started but has not been completed yet. They are fragile situations, always in danger of total collapse. As a reaction to the increasing criminal violence, the former war combatants - the non-state violent actors - use vigilante forms of violence: for example “tarring-andfeathering” or “kneecapping”. The restorative justice intervention aims at two directions simultaneously: it aims at reducing criminal as well as vigilante violence. On the micro-level, the level of society, the paper analyzes the ways and means restorative justice “actors” responded to the various form of violence in Northern Ireland. On the macro-level, the paper seeks to clarify the relevance of restorative justice for the management of the “grey zones” of security that typically arise in post-conflict settings. In this context the restorative justice concept can make an enduring contribution to the stabilization of the conflict transformation process as whole.