Autopoiesis and the Limits of Closure in International Law: Interpretation, Social Practice, and the Temporal Life of Legal Meaning

This article re-examines the claim that international law is an autopoietic legal system. Autopoiesis remains attractive because it explains how a legal order may preserve a distinct identity through self-reference, recursive norm production, and operational closure in the absence of a central legislator, compulsory jurisdiction, or unified enforcement. Yet the theory, even in its most sophisticated recent applications to international law, explains the reproduction of legal argument far better than the stabilisation of legal meaning . Engaging systems theory at its strongest point, Luhmann’s account of structural coupling and cognitive openness, the article argues that coupling explains how law is irritated by its environment, but not how semantic authority is accumulated, contested, and redistributed across dispersed interpretive communities. The article therefore proposes a model of graduated closure : international law exhibits strong operational closure, weak and regime-relative semantic closure, and a distinctive temporal closure managed through disciplined reapplication. The model is developed against three interlocutors, the autopoietic account of international law recently renewed by Kang, the structural-indeterminacy thesis associated with Koskenniemi, and the interpretive-practice account associated with Venzke, and is given observable indicia drawn from anthropological, semiotic, and temporal analysis of doctrinal practice. International law emerges as a partially autonomous interpretive order: real in its autonomy, relative in its closure, and dependent for its continuity on the social, semiotic, and temporal processes through which legal meaning is stabilised, contested, and renewed.