Whereas the new millennium brought with it a focus on collision rules within global governance and corporate governance, the economic crises emerging out of 2008 turned the focus to the failure of regulatory practices. The current crises challenge not only a neoliberal hegemony but the New Deal/Great Society coordinating state model as well; as we have moved not only beyond a society of individuals to a society of organizations. We live now in a society of transnational network contracting and corporate governance practices. This society of networks can no longer be clearly associated with traditional conceptions of state, market or civil society/ public versus private. Amidst this crisis, emerging legal challenges can no longer be coped with by institutions and ritualized routines of laissezfaire liberalism, social liberalism or neoliberalism. This paper redirects focus to an increasingly disembedded style of contracting amidst multi-polar and multi-rational regimes of conflict regulation/ dispute resolution. In doing so this paper starts from the prism of contracting practices and rituals: arguing that an understanding of how the discourse of governing contracts is continually and irreversibly implicated in the evolution of a network of heterarchical private relationships and public institutions.