Regionalism Versus Globalism : A View from the Americas

The well-deserved celebration of UNIDROIT'S first seventy-five years focused on a topic that is of particular interest to the Organization of American States and to the organ of the OAS to which the author belongs, the Inter-American Juridical Committee. The topic of the 75th Anniversary Congress -- "Worldwide Harmonization of Private Law and Regional Integration" -- implicates one of the several dichotomies with which we in the Inter-American system who work on questions of private international law (and international private law) have been grappling in recent years, the problem of regional versus global approaches to the harmonization of private international law (and international private law). In this brief contribution, the author offers a few comments on this and related dichotomies from the perspective of the Inter-American private international law codification process