Postmodernism has gone from being primarily a hermeneutic and methodological category to a historical and sociological one. Most typically, in the analyses of theorists such as Bauman, Lyotard and Harvard, the advent of postmodernity is identified in the twilight of the welfare state and its typical institutions. The argument of this book is that contemporary law - defined in its broadest sense to include the legal system, legal doctrine, legal method and legal ideology - can be understood as having undergone parallel changes.;This suggests a reconsideration of some influential neo-evolutionist analyses of thenature of law inthe welfare state, those such as Unger, Teubner, Hayek, Nonet, Selznick and Habermas. These include: the unravelling of the welfare state and neo-corporatist regulation, the privatization of justice, legal polycentricity, the de-differentiation of law, the transformation of legal temporality and the transnationalism of law.