To their credit, empirical legal scholars try to live up to the highest methodological standards from the social sciences. But these standards do not always match the legal research question. This paper focuses on normative legal argument based on empirical evidence. Whether there is a normative...

We model the settlement of a legal dispute where the trial outcome depends on the behavior of a strategically motivated judge. We consider a standard asymmetric information model where the uninformed defendant makes a take it or leave it offer. If the case goes to trial, the judge decides how...

Economic theory has made considerable progress in explaining why sovereign countries cooperate in trade. Central to most theories of trade cooperation are issues of self-enforcement: The threat of reprisal by an aggrieved party maintains the initial balance of concessions and prevents...

I propose a framework within which to interpret and evaluate the major reforms introduced to the GATT system in its transition to the WTO. In particular, I examine the WTO Agreement on Safeguards that has replaced the GATT escape clause (Article XIX), and the Dispute Settlement Process (DSP)...

The WTO's Dispute Settlement Mechanism (DSM) has been hailed as a fundamental aspect of the Multilateral Trading System for developing countries. At the same time developing countries face many challenges to ensure their effective participation in the mechanism. This paper presents statistical...

Commitments in regional trade agreements (RTAs) that fall short of the same countries' obligations under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) are a relatively frequent phenomenon. However, they have gone widely unnoticed in the literature to date and drawn very little attention in...

Das deutsche System der industriellen Beziehungen weist im internationalen Vergleich gemeinhin ein hohes Mass an Verrechtlichung auf. Umso ueberraschender ist der Umstand, dass das Recht und seine Akteure, Institutionen und Verfahren in der Forschung ueber Arbeitsbeziehungen seit Jahrzehnten...

Emerging and developing states are home to powerful corporations capable of deploying economic activities on a global scale. But such corporations have to date been largely overlooked in the field of business and human rights. Treatment of such corporations has typically been in the context of...

Given the urgent need to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and concern regarding insufficient climate action and ambition across the globe, NGOs and individuals are increasingly turning to the courts to force States, public authorities, and private entities to increase their climate...

Effective civil judicial remedies are often inaccessible to victims of transnational corporations (TNCs) from economically developed states that operate in developing or emerging states. The general consensus is that local capacity development is the most practical solution. The alternative...