This article offers a comparative sociological perspective on the transformation of law and legal rationality in the US and continental Europe during the 20th century. It takes off from Max Weber's categories of formal and substantive legal rationality and proposes to examine post-Weberian developments in common and civil law from a new perspective, namely the rise of negotiated process rationality and its variants as emergent modes of legal governance. Process rationality is embedded in social networks as structures-in-process. In contrast to conventional forms of institutional government, governance is a series of informal, flexible and expedient strategies of problem-solving and crisis management based on bargaining and negotiation. The incipient privatization, commercialization and denationalization of law are understood as consequences of the postwar transnational expansion of American common law in the wake of globalization and the growth of US economic and political influence. The theoretical and practical implications of the rise of process rationality for constitutional jurisprudence and adjudication are profound, but require a separate technical analysis and critical discussion.
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