Publisher's Synopsis
This book deals with legal pluralism in an emerging world society. Its central thesis is that globalization of law tends to create a decentered law-making process which occurs in multiple sectors of civil society, independently of nation states. Technical standardization, professional rule production, human rights, intra-organizational regulation in multinational enterprises, contracting and arbitration are forms of rule-making by 'private governments' which have appeared on a massive global scale. They claim world-wide validity independently of the law of the nation states and in relative distance to the rules on international public law. They have come into existence not by formal acts of nation states but by strange paradoxical acts of self-validation.
