This paper explores how algorithmic rationality may be considered a new bureaucracy according to Weber’s conceptualization of legal rationality. It questions the idea that technical disintermediation may achieve the goal of algorithmic neutrality and objective decision-making. It argues that such rationality is represented by surveillance purposes in the broadest meaning. Algorithmic surveillance reduces the complexity of reality calculating the probability that certain facts happen on the basis of repeated actions. The persuasive power of algorithms aims at predicting social behaviours that are expected to be repeated in time. Against this static model, the role of law and legal culture is relevant for individual emancipation and social change. The paper is divided into three sections: the first section describes commonalities and differences between legal bureaucracy and algorithms; the second part examines the linkage between a data-driven model of law production and algorithmic rationality; the third part questions the idea of law production by data as a product of legal culture.

This chapter addresses core theoretical issues surrounding global/transnational legal pluralism, taking up the work of leading theorists. First, is demonstrates that global legal pluralism is very different from earlier versions of legal pluralism (postcolonial and sociological). Next, is exposes the flaw of overinclusive conceptions of legal pluralism, which appears in the global legal pluralism of Paul Berman, and it explains why theoretical concepts of law cannot solve this flaw. It then addresses the profusion of private and hybrid regulatory forms on the domestic and transnational levels, and marks the line between theory and practice. Thereafter, it exposes problems with the relational concept of law formulated for global legal pluralism by Ralf Michaels, showing why it is unsuitable for many situations of legal pluralism. The approach to transnational legal pluralism the chapter articulates avoids these conceptual problems. It centres on conventionally identified forms of law that vary and change over time, which can be grouped in terms of three categories: community law, regime law and cross-polity law. Finally, it sets forth a handful of specific lessons for a reconstructed transnational legal pluralism.

The sociology of contracting confirms that successfully relationships rest on other-regarding behavior, motivated by internal or external forces, which determines trust and order without law.