This work deals with legal pluralism in an emerging world society. It central thesis is that globalization of law tends to create a decentred 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, arbitration and other institutions of lex mercatoria are forms of rule by private governments, claiming world-wide validity independently of the law of the nation states. They have come into existence (...) not by formal acts of nation states but by strange paradoxical acts of self-validation. (shrink)