[Published in M. Maduro, K. Tuori, S. Sankari (eds.), Transnational Law. Rethinking European Law and Legal Thinking, Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 78-96] Beyond the Archetypes of Modern Legal Thought Appraising Old and New Forms of Interaction between legal orders E. Cannizzaro and B.I. Bonafé • 1. Monism and dualism in contemporary legal experience For more than a century, the landscape of relations between legal orders has been dominated by monism and dualism. From the beginning, these two doctrines have tended to assert themselves as comprehensive and mutually exclusive: antithetical paradigms of legal thought. Ever since, their confrontation has featured the evolution of legal thinking and still echoes in legal literature. In the course of the decades, many voices have recurrently been raised, invoking against this theological dispute and calling for abandonment of theoretical schemes regarded to be as relics of a different era. 1 Nonetheless, monism and dualism still resist and defy every attempt to construe construct alternative legal doctrines. In our view, the reason for their enduring success consists in an apparent paradox. On the one hand, monism and dualism as such have never been applied in practice. No contemporary legal order can be defined as fully monist or fully dualist. Good reasons exist to believe that their integral application would create more problems than they could solve. Recurrently, voices have been raised that the time is ripe to abandon them. In other words, it seems that these conceptions are inapplicable in practice and only exist as purely ideal schemes. On the other hand, monism and dualism are constantly referred to as the conceptual basis of legal discourse in relations between legal orders. Every endeavour to demonstrate their obsolescence clashes with the objection that no alternative scheme has been satisfactorily devised. The reason for their persistence in legal discourse lies in the fact that monism and dualism do not have normative value. They do not establish rules, nor do they produce obligations. They are legal archetypes that we use to materialise our conception of legal orders and in which we channel the ways we conceptualis the relations between legal • The study as a whole is the product of the co-operation between the two co-authors and must be jointly attributed to them. However, it is possible to determine the paragraphs, which ought to be attributed to either one. Enzo Cannizzaro is the author of paragraphs 1, 2, and 3, and Beatrice I. Bonafè is the author of paragraphs 4, 5, and 6. 1 See e.g. I. Brownlie, Principles of Public International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 33; more bluntly, A. von Bogdandy, ‘Pluralism, direct effect, and the ultimate say: on the relationship between international and domestic constitutional law’, 6 International Journal of Constitutional Law (2008), 397– 413 at 400.