By focusing on two recent developments, the authors of this chapter argue that rule of law principles can provide a general yardstick to evaluate even these norm-building processes that occur beyond the state. First, various discourses on governance in contexts beyond the state have started to integrate non-state legal structures into the rule of law concepts illustrated in terms of constitutional law, law and development, and global governance, generalizing the criteria under which non-state law can assume the same quality as the rule of law. And second, there is an increasing tendency in contexts “beyond the state” to use experiences subsumed under the rule of law as a normative yardstick to measure non-state processes of setting and enforcing norms, as well as the quality of those norms. Distanced from its origin as a principle of state law, the rule of law functions here as a general standard for legitimate and effective rule-making.