Empirisme, constructivisme et grande théorie dans les approches sociologiques du droit : le cas de la réglementation privée transnationale

In this article, I discuss the epistemological contrast between empirical socio-legal studies and the "grand theory" of systems approaches to law by focusing on how they address transnational private regulation. Empirical socio-legal studies share an epistemic commitment to an objective and knowable social reality, and they tend to view human actors as the drivers of history. Thus, they focus on the interrelational dynamics within global value chains (GVCs), looking for "what works" in transnational private regulation. In contrast, systems theory-oriented sociological jurisprudence views social reality as constructed and fragmented into epistemes of different social systems. Global value chains are understood as self-referential normative orders, in which the question of agency and human actors is secondary to the emphasis on communications and anonymous ordering forces. In attempting to examine the possibilities of synthesis, I ask how "big" we can and should think about law and society. In doing so, I attempt to sketch an approach that starts from the materiality of social structures to study processes beyond individual agency and to discover elements of normative reconstruction of the particular domain of social activity.