Sociology of Law between national legal systems and world society

According to the luhmannian paradigm of world society, policontestural and characterized by functional differentiation, a regional idea of society should be rejected. However, it is clear that there are still strong differences in national political and legal subsystems, particularly with regard to the fundamental rights recognized to individuals and their effective protection. In particular rights and values recognized by international treaties are often incompatible (see M. Neves, 2013). This work will be compared with the contributions on this issue by N. Luhmann (fundamental rights are institutions that emerge to allow social differentiation, protect it from the expansionist tendencies of the political subsystem and assign individual rights outside of the norm of reciprocity) and by G. Teubner (according to him it is necessary to distinguish between institutional, personal and human rights, the latter "understood as negative limits imposed on societal communications, where the physical and mental integrity of the individuals is undermined by a communicative matrix"). These contributions are representing a sociology of constitutions at present widely discussed in Latin American countries. In order to avoid an anti-humanistic approach, which considers the individuals outside the inter-systemic communication, we need to take into account that, in a contemporary world characterized by less and less differentiated systems, the multisystemic environment is subject to dynamism and reflexive communicative channels (strukturelle Kopplung) between subsystems. Constitutions could be thus combine closure and openness of the legal system by resorting to strategies of institutionalization of internal self-reflection and external communication.