Can law-and-humanities survive systems theory?

Systems theory, as developed by the German sociologist and legal scholar Niklas Luhmann, presents a challenge to law-and-humanities scholarship. If law and literature, namely, are two autonomous social subsystems-on the analogy of two languages that communicate each within itself and have nothing to say to each other-then what can the "and" in law-and-literature mean? This paper compares the premises of systems theory with Habermasian and poststructuralist views of the law, and adumbrates both the strictures that an acceptance of systems theory would place on explorations of the relationship between law-and-humanities and the opportunities it might provide for new approaches to that relationship.