The Law of the Network Society and the Problem of Hybridity Management

Abstract

The network society, which is relevant to the social landscape of the 21st century, determines the building of a new architecture of law. The current legal map of the world is extremely heterogeneous and often does not coincide with the political map of the world. It is full of a variety of normative arrays that collide with each other, layered on top of each other, while the traditional legal methodology is not always able to resolve conflicts that arise. The problem of controversy between law and not law is gaining considerable potential due to the rapid growth of non-legal matter and the emergence of legitimizing institutions. The situation is complicated by the simultaneous existence of several institutional dispute resolution systems (state, non-state, alternative, platform-based) that refer to completely different, relatively autonomous subsystems of norms as applicable law. Such material and institutional fragmentation, the emergence of hybrid regulatory and institutional regimes has provoked an active search for new principles of building a legal architecture that is adequate to such a rapidly changing society. Globalization is transforming into networking, which redefines the geography of the world, the well-known and traditional principles of affiliation of legal entities, and then exacerbates the debates about legal taxonomy. The marked evolution of the legal superstructure also generates new types of conflicts, prompting the search for a new or adaptation of the known methodology in order to overcome them.The paper attempts to explore the new normativity in the context of a new sociality, to identify key trends in the development of the law of a network society, to predict the development of individual legal and sub-legal institutions, and to model legal ways of managing hybridity.