ABSTRACT
Fundamental changes in the international environment in the last decade of the twentieth century illustrate the difficulty of making predictions: Even expert kremlinologists failed to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union. Among those who attempt to predict how the world community will evolve in the twenty-first century, the favorite buzz-word is "globalization." As a concomitant of the globalization of markets and the organization and business practices of the multi-national corporations that operate in those markets, there has been some movement toward a relatively uniform global contract and commercial law. Given the place of the United States in the world economy, this globalization of law through private corporate lawmaking rather naturally takes the form of the global Americanization of commercial law. Globalization and Americanization go together precisely because the almost frantic pace of American innovation put the United States well "ahead" of the rest of the world.
