Three conceptions of law: towards a jurisprudence of democratic experimentalism

The Article takes as its starting point the recent transformation in our legal, political, and social relations that is suggested in the literature on “new governance.” It asks, what are the implications of this transformation for our conception of law and legality, and, specifically, what is the relationship between law and new governance? The existing responses to this question are presented as generally falling into two groups: those that argue that law is transformed in the move to new governance, and those that argue that there is an irredeemable conceptual and normative gap between law and new governance. At the back of each of these accounts of the relationship between law and new governance is a more fundamental conception of legality: in the former case, a functionalist, and in the latter case, a liberal-legalist conception of legality. Arguing that neither of these approaches is satisfactory, I propose a third account of the relationship between law and new governance, the contingency thesis, which is supported by a democratic conception of legality.