A situation in which a structurally coupled relationship exists between the agent and the environment is required for a system to count as being embodied.
From: Handbook of Cognitive Science, 2008 page 
, 5 - CajunBot: A Case Study in Embodied Cognition page
# Legal Evolution and Structural Coupling
Rogowski, R. “Law, Autopoiesis In.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, edited by Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, 8500–8502. Oxford: Pergamon, 2001. https://doi.org/10.1016/B0-08-043076-7/02931-4:
The legal system forms part of the functionally differentiated modern society (other function systems include among others the economic, the political, and the religious systems). Each system within society evolves separately along its own trajectory, with its own internal structures and processes determining its development. In explaining the transformation of the legal system into an autopoietic system, Gunther Teubner points to a ‘hypercycle’ by which internal processes turn law into a self-reproducing system (Teubner, 1993, Ch. 3).
However, the evolution of social systems is not determined exclusively by internal conditions. Specific external relations that derive from structural couplings also have an effect. Structural coupling allows only selective exchanges between the systems. Structural coupling produces irritations and perturbations inside the system that are implemented by the system through its network of operations into further operations (Luhmann, 2013/2014, Vol. 1, Ch. 3).
These perturbations do not actually cause changes; rather, they serve as triggers that may initiate internally controlled operations in operationally closed systems. Thus, structural coupling of social systems does not contribute directly to the reproduction of the systems. It is simply the form in which the system presupposes specific states or changes in its environment and relies on them. The constitution provides an example of structural coupling between the legal and the political systems (Luhmann, 2004, Ch. 10). When constitutions emerged in the eighteenth century, they helped recombine the functionally differentiated political and legal systems. From an autopoietic perspective, constitutions were adopted in response to problems of self-reference, paradoxes, and asymmetries in the legal and the political systems of the respective countries. In the political system constitutions are the mechanisms of self-binding sovereign power. In the legal system it provides the latter with the power to determine the constitutionality of positive law.