Baxter (Boston Univ.) tracks the role of law from Habermas's early work to Between Facts and Norms and beyond. Habermas's assessment of modernity--humanity suffers when money and power colonize lifeworld practices--begs the question of the location of law. Does law belong to system or to lifeworld? In his work on communicative action, law belonged to system, but later Habermas awakened to the ways democratic legitimacy and collective will-formation find articulation in law. If law partakes of moral, ethical, and pragmatic application, employing strategic bargaining apace with genuinely communicative practices, then law acts instead as a "translator among discourses," a dialectical engine between communicative power and administrative power. Baxter concludes that Habermas's later work on law actually disavowed the utility of the system-lifeworld scheme (despite his ritual invocation of those terms) and recommends that the concept of lifeworld "should be dropped." Baxter's own predilection is to reconfigure Habermas's project as a more porous version of Niklas Luhmann's autopoietic systems theory. With attention to Talcott Parsons, Frank Michelman, Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls, and particularly Luhmann, Baxter contributes an immanent and comparative critique of Habermas, though not truly as advertised, one that "presumes no prior familiarity with Habermas's work."