Poul F Kjaer is Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Cluster of Excellence: Formation of Normative Orders, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main.
Gunther Teubner is Professor of Law and Principal Investigator at the Cluster of Excellence: Formation of Normative Orders, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main and Distinguished Professor at the International University College, Torino.
Alberto Febbrajo is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology of Law at the University of Macerata, Italy.

This volume presents the first thorough sociologically-informed legal analysis of the financial crisis which unfolded in 2008. It combines a multitude of theoretically informed analyses of the causes, dynamics and reactions to the crisis and contextualises these within the general structural transformations characterising contemporary society. It furthermore explores the constitutional implications of the crisis and suggests concrete changes to the constitutional set-up of contemporary society.
Although the question of individual responsibility is of crucial importance, the central idea animating the volume is that the crisis cannot be reduced to a mere failure of risk perception and management for which individual and collective actors within and outside of financial organisations are responsible. The 2008 crisis should rather be understood as a symptom of far deeper structural transformations. For example contemporary society is characterised by massive accelerations in the speed with which societal processes are reproduced as well as radical expansions in the level of globalisation. These transformations have, however, been asymmetrical in nature insofar as the economic system has outpaced its legal and political counterparts. The future capability of legal and political systems to influence economic reproduction processes is therefore conditioned by equally radical transformations of their respective operational forms and self-understanding. Potentially the 2008 crisis, therefore, has far-reaching constitutional implications.

Introduction
Poul F Kjaer
SECTION I: The Financial Crisis in a Systemic Perspective
1. A Constitutional Moment? The Logics of 'Hitting the Bottom'
Gunther Teubner
2. Towards a General Theory of Function System Crises
Rudolf Stichweh
SECTION II: Dynamics
Section II.1: The Breakdown of Expectations
3. The Financial Market Crisis-a Case of Network Failure?
Karl-Heinz Ladeur
4. Death by Complexity-the Financial Crisis and the Crisis of Law in World Society
Moritz Renner
5. Political Epidemiology and the Financial Crisis
Urs Stäheli
Section II.2: Fundamental Crises of society
6. The Return of Crisis
Hauke Brunkhorst
7. The Culture Form of Crisis
Dirk Baecker
8. What is a Crisis?
Jean Clam
SECTION III: Reactions
Section III.1: Regulatory Reactions
9. Eroding Boundaries: On Financial Crisis and an Evolutionary Concept of Regulatory Reform
Marc Amstutz
10. The Failure of Regulatory Institutions-a Conceptual Framework
Alberto Febbrajo
Section III.2: Individual and Collective Reactions
11. Struggles for Law: Global Social Rights as an Alternative to Financial Market Capitalism
Kolja Möller
12. The Ethics of the Financial Crisis
Aldo Mascareño
Section III.3: Constitutional Transformation
13. The Future of the State
Chris Thornhill
14. Law and Order within and Beyond National Configurations
Poul F Kjaer