more sources of normativity

I'd just finished Korsgaard's account of normativity (save for the responses by the likes of Williams, Nagel, Cohen etc, helpfully included as the book's final chapters), which was precise but uninspiring, when I came across another account: Niklas Luhmann's theory in his Sociology of Law. There couldn't very well be a sharper contrast between the two--Korsgaard's theory is designed as a series of lectures, terribly, almost laboriously clear. It is an accout of normativity viewed from the inside, for actors who experience normative pressures. Luhmann's is neither of these things. It is quite difficult to read, which, in this case, is an odd byproduct of precision: the man does not use synonyms, and so when he begins to write about expectations of expectations of expectations of action by various actors, one finds oneself longing for the sort of manic thesaurus use evidenced by, say, the NY Times column Modern Love. That said, the theory is extremely clever--it is, basically, that there are two kinds of strategies for dealing with disappointment in expectations: the cognitive strategy, where one decides to alter one's expectations, and the normative strategy, where one does not, even if they are repeatedly disappointed. Which strategies are best for which types of things is largely a cultural decision, based on what the society sees as most conducive to its own survival. With increasing complexity, Luhmann argues, these strategies become more sharply differentiated. I haven't actually gotten to law yet, though the approach already makes it clear that one of the major problems in analytic legal philosophy, the problem of law's normativity, will not be a problem here. In short, very interesting and, I think, very useful.

sources of normativity

I'm just beginning Christine Korsgaard's The Sources of Normativity on a recommendation from a legal-philosopher friend. Judging by the introduction, I doubt that it's going to have an account of normativity that much resembles the one that we, insofar as we are critics, and therefore default New Historicists/post-structuralists/etc. assume. Time, we tend to think, is a great worker of normativity, transforming 'is' to 'ought' (pace Hume) across the span of years or centuries, like Euhemerus' princes becoming gods.

The law explicitly allows time this privilege. I'm thinking, in particular, of possession--a factual thing--and property--a normative one. In the Roman law system possession becomes property after a certain period by a process called usucaption, originally instituted as a solution to defective property titles. In the early Republic, one year was required for usucaption of land, two for usucaption of movable real property (slaves, animals, certain farm implements). The same amount of time was required for some types of rights to disappear by non-use (servitudes: as the right to channel water through a neighbor's field, and so forth), and when Justinian lengthened the time needed for usucaption--a practical necessity given imperial expansion--the amount of time required for servitudes to become invalid changed symmetrically. The designated period, then, was the period required for relations to land or goods to become normative, in one way or another.

What I am wondering, then, is whether you can think of any other systems in which time is explicitly considered to create normative relations? I suppose the other example that comes to mind is the philosophy of conservativism, but I rather suspect that's usually an epistemological claim, a claim, that is, that time sorts out which practices are best, not that it in itself legitimates them. Examples? Limit cases?