Law as an Autopoietic System by Gunther Teubner - books.google.co.uk 
Gunther Teubner (born 30 April 1944, Herrnhut) is a German legal scholar and sociologist, best known for his works within the field of Social Theory of Law - wikipedia
Since 2007, Teubner has been Principal Investigator at the Frankfurt Excellence Cluster "The Formation of Normative Orders". In 2011 he has taken up an "ad personam" Jean Monnet Chair at the International University College of Turin - uni-frankfurt.de
For a discussion on the evolution and development of autopoietic legal systems, see, Neil T. Lyons, Autopoiesis: Evolution, Assimilation, and Causation of Normative Closure, in, Law, Justice, and Miscommunications: Essays in Applied Legal Philosophy, (ed. Dr. Tim Kaye, Vanderplas Publishing, 2011) ISBN 978-1-600-42152-5.
Mr Neil T. Lyons (Stetson University College of Law, Florida, USA), '"I've overseen the assimilation of countless millions. You were no different."Autopoiesis: Evolution, Assimilation, and Causation of Normative Closure'
Niklas_Luhmann
Luhmann likens the operation of autopoiesis (the filtering and processing of information from the environment) to a program, making a series of logical distinctions - wikipedia
Here, Luhmann refers to the British mathematician G. Spencer-Brown's logic of distinctions that Maturana and Varela had earlier identified as a model for the functioning of any cognitive process.
The supreme criterion guiding the "self-creation" of any given system is a defining binary code. This binary code, is not to be confused with the computers operation: Luhmann (following Spencer-Brown and Gregory Bateson) assumes that auto-referential systems are continuously confronted with the dilemma of disintegration/continuation.
This dilemma is framed with an ever-changing set of available choices; everyone of those potential choices can be the system's selection or not (a binary state, selected/rejected). The influence of Spencer-Brown's book, Laws of Form, on Luhmann can hardly be overestimated.