Globalization and Law: Law Beyond the State

If globalization is the main paradigm of our time, then a chapter on globalization and law could also be entitled, simply, the law of our time. Few, if any, areas of law are not—at least potentially—fundamentally impacted by globalization. In reality, of course, the impact of globalization on legal thought has, so far, been more limited. That has various reasons. A first reason is that globalization, although (or perhaps because) it is generally accepted as the new paradigm of society, has remained a remarkably vague concept in general discourse. The fundamental debates over globalization of the 1990s more or less petered out, without leading to a clear consensus. A second reason is that legal thought has so far reacted to globalization not with a true paradigm shift but instead by more and more inapt attempts to adapt the methodological nationalism that has provided its paradigm for the last two hundred years or so. The same can still be said about much of social theory, which also remains within such a state paradigm. Globalization has not, yet, led to a true paradigm shift.