Discussions of the future lie within the realm of soothsayers and other such prognosticators. The track record of those ‘professionals', often rightly described as charlatans, is famously not so great. Nor have many of the great scientists or politicians of modern times been more successful....

Conventional wisdom has it that, in recent years, the legalized mechanism of dispute settlement before the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been “busier than ever”, “a victim of its own success”. This paper uses count data to assess the WTO’s current caseload and examines how it has...