This paper attempts to bring the specific insights of conflict of laws to issues challenging contemporary legal theory in its efforts to integrate the changes wrought by globalisation in the normative landscape beyond the nation-state. Indeed, conflicting norms and social systems are now at the centre-stage of jurisprudence. Conversely however, private international legal thinking can benefit from attention to the other legal disciplines that have preceded it in ‘going global’. It needs to undergo a conceptual overhauling in order to capture law’s novel foundations and features and adjust its epistemological and methodological tools to its transformed environment. It must reconsider the debate about legitimacy of political authority and the values that constitute its normative horizon. From this perspective, societal constitutionalism, as mooted by Teubner, provides a particularly promising avenue for unbounding the conflict of laws, which might then emerge as a form of de-centred, reflexive coordination of global legal interactions. [Abstract editor]