Constitutional Courts as Autopoietic Organisations

The chapter proposes to conceptualise constitutional courts as self-referentially operating, autopoietic systems. In a social systems theory perspective constitutional courts are autopoietic organisations which are capable of generating sufficient cognitive complexity in order to regulate themselves. This is demonstrated first in relation to three aspects of constitutional courts: autonomy in docket control, recursive decision-making and the development of consequentialist legal doctrine that makes reflexive use of information on its impact. In the final section the chapter assesses the role of autopoietic constitutional courts operating in the zone of structural coupling between the legal and the political system