This book concerns the transformation of the modes of governance of contemporary developed democracies and aims to define the conditions required for the promotion of the public interest in these democracies' public policy. It has two goals - firstly to show why a sound theoretical appraoch to the concept of law results in opening up the theory of law to the debate on governance in the social sciences. Secondly, it reconstructs the underpinnings of recent debate on governance, focusing on the pragmatist turn that has marked efforts to overcome the inadequacies of both the economic and the deliberative approaches. In fulfilling this second goal, it examines the advances yielded by the pragmatist turn as well as its limitations and concludes by proposing a theoretical approach to dealing with its limitations. This illuminating book applies recent research in both theory of law and theory of governance and it seeks to deepen the analytic impact of the recent pragmatist revival.