Slowly but surely, international trade agreements have disappeared from U.S. courts. This Essay provides a concise historical account of this disappearance--which it calls the ‘‘Great Vanishing’’--and explains how and why it came to pass. It first describes how the Trade Preferences Act...

This paper discusses allocation of burden of proof in environmental disputes in the WTO system. Besides laying down the natural principles that (i) the complainant carries the burden to (ii) make a prima facie case that its claim holds, WTO adjudicating bodies have said little of more general...

Focusing on the expanding realm of international adjudication, this paper approaches justice from the domain of the empirical and shows - through a careful, interview-based case-study analysis in the WTO-EU context - that justice in the transnational context is not only a contested concept, but...

WTO judges are proposed by the WTO Secretariat and elected to act as 'judges' if either approved by the parties to a dispute, or by the WTO Director-General in case no agreement between the parties has been possible. They are typically 'Geneva crowd', that is, they are either current or former...

Controversies about the inclusion of the investment-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism have been dominating the debate surrounding the ongoing negotiations of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) agreement in many EU countries. The level of social anxiety and the...

What shapes jurisprudence in international law? States dedicate considerable effort trying to influence not only the outcome, but also the content, of legal rulings. The stakes are high, as these legal opinions can redefine the meaning of the rules. Looking at the World Trade Organization, we...