Laetitia:
By the way Francis, the world is small : doing some research on system thinking, cybernetics and law I found a Prof. in Buenos Aires who wrote a book in spanich (unfortunately I don't read spanish) about a systemic vision of law.
Perhaps you could convince Carlos to read and summarize it for you ;-) Or there may be other Spanish-speaking ECCO members interested in this...
There is only one small article in english which shows we concluded the same: the necessity to use systems thinking and cybernetics to make a move towards a legal model for the future. The funny thing is I noticed that he wrote comments on principia cybernetica'site to announce his book...."toutes les routes m�nent � Rome" -) His name is Ernesto Grun. Did you had any further contact with him ? I guess his complete vision would be of great interest for me.
Yes, I got some emails from him several years ago, and he is also a subscriber to the Global Brain mailing list that I administer. He is moreover a friend of Charles Fran�ois, a pensioned Belgian ambassador in Buenos Aires, who edited the "Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics" and whom I know personally. He also sent me a short essay in English on "Homo ciberneticus", which may be the same one you saw. Otherwise, I can send you the file.
Other work that looks at law from a systems perspective is the one of Niklas Luhmann, a famous German sociologist, recently deceased, who applied Maturana's concept of autopoiesis to society. There too "all roads lead to Rome" as Luhmann cited my work in one of his papers, and I cited him. But I know very little about his theories (though I probably should ;-). The local specialist is Johan Stuy, a colleague of mine in the VUB philosophy department, whose course on "systems theory" basically focuses on Luhmann (otherwise, Stuy is a moral philosopher who doesn't know much about systems).
Another good place to start looking for connections is the "Sociocybernetics" research group to which Luhmann belonged, and which studies society from a systems perspective. They are very active, well-organized, and have a lot of interesting people that are members (you can easily become a member yourself to get their newsletter and announcements). I am a (not very active) member myself, and I personally know the president and secretary, Bernd Hornung and Felix Geyer, in case you need an introduction. They have gathered a lot of useful info (including their freely downloadable Journal of Sociocybernetics) on : http://www.unizar.es/sociocybernetics/indice.html
E.g. in their bibliography I find at least one paper that seems interesting for you:
Turner, J. H. (1974) A Cybernetic Model of Legal Development. Western Sociological Review 5, 3-16.
But perhaps other ECCO members can also suggest references of systems/cybernetics perspectives to law? --
Francis Heylighen "Evolution, Complexity and Cognition" research group Free University of Brussels http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html
