Gunther Teubner: Externalizing normativities

You have here a very recent lecture by Gunther Teubner at Frankfurt University on the externalization of normativities as a constitutional aspect of legal pluralism. With this approach, Teubner tries to explain the centrality of State Legal Constitutions in front of the Political Constitution, the Economic Constitution or the Science Constitution.

While there is a perfect reciprocal coupling between the legal Constitution and the Political Constitution, the Economic Constitution only pass on its claim for legitimacy partially to the law, and the Science constitution cannot externalize its normativity by passing it on to the law. In the latter case this move would lead to the end of science.

With this reference to the externalization of normativities, he intends to explain apparently different phenomena, such as the global social movements (connected to the idea of constitutionalism from below and presented as a fragmented constitutional power - poder constituyente), the rising of judge made law or the "resurrection" of natural law as an alternative for externalizatin of normativity and understood as a "sociological" natural law rather than religious, rationalistic or politic.

He doesn't discuss the possibility of a global constitution to which all the others could at this moment of time turn for this kind of externalization. A global constitution might be too close to the idea of natural law.

YOU CAN SEE TEUBNER'S LECTURE HERE