The Legal Order: A Historically Situated Concept

Benoit Frydman argues that the legal order is fundamentally a historically contingent paradigm rather than an ontological necessity, tracing its emergence to classical seventeenth-century geometric rationality and the scientific revolution. While this paradigm proved enormously useful for organizing coherent national legal systems through codification and axiomatized natural law theory, Frydman demonstrates that contemporary jurisprudence faces a crisis as this analytical tool becomes inadequate for understanding global legal phenomena that traverse multiple legal orders or exist entirely outside established hierarchical systems. Frydman advocates for pragmatic abandonment of the legal order concept when addressing transnational legal interactions, arguing that practitioners and theorists benefit from recognizing this paradigm as one useful instrument among others.