This article explores a social vision of global public order taken from transnational private law. It recasts the potential role of private law in the cross-border economic context as centrally concerned with private action as both the object and vehicle of substantive and procedural governance. Viewed in this way, private law is a venue. for the contestation and regulation of private action by private action in the contemporary global system. With its distinctive strengths and weaknesses, transnational private law is viewed as one alternative among many regimes of global order and is understood to perform a social- indeed, "public"-function in the embedding of private behavior and relationships within a broader social order.