Since the 1970s, critical legal scholarship has made use of the concept of 'infra-law' to draw attention to a certain set of administrative and governance practices. These practices are characterised by a wide use of regulatory instruments that are easily taken away from public and sometimes even legal control. They allow, therefore, the regulation of specific matters, as well as the condition of particular subjects, in ways that are incompatible with the explicit principles of the rule of law, without these principles having to be called into question. In this essay I will try to delineate the theoretical context in which the concept of infra-law is more clearly shown and its limits and potentialities become comprehensible.
