In this article, I discuss how preferential trade agreements have started incorporating consumer protection provisions, in deviation from the traditional practice of leaving consumer protection to domestic law. The article first outlines the traditional frontier between consumer law and trade...

The aim of this paper is to explore the political dimensions of investment arbitration. What drives the structures and rules of this institution of private-transnational dispute settlement? To define political dimensions and develop the basis of a political explanation of investment arbitration,...

This paper addresses the role of bilateral free trade agreements in U.S. trade policy and how their increased use has affected the multilateral trade system. It also considers the effects of bilateral trade deals on developing countries in terms of power bargaining and movement toward reciprocal...

The WTO Anti-Dumping Agreement: A Commentary by Edwin Vermulst is the second in the Oxford Commentaries on the GATT/WTO Agreements series. This book is recommended to anyone wanting to understand anti-dumping in the WTO

Free trade and customs union agreements are the rage. Hundreds of bilateral and regional free trade agreements have been notified to the World Trade Organization (WTO), which in theory quot;regulatesquot; them under Article XXIV of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).1 For example,...

The proliferation of investment and intellectual property (IP) agreements recently has been accompanied by an increasing number and expanded scope of investment disputes. The agreements give rise to various issues that particularly affect developing countries. One of the issues that has recently...

Free Trade Agreements between developed countries now frequently contain provisions on investor protection, but the resolution of disputes remains problematic. Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) allows investors to bring direct claims against a host State before an...

This article discusses the fast track procedure and its recent use in the context of environmental and labor issues. The procedure, which allows the President to negotiate international trade agreements and bypass Congressional amendments, emerged in 1997 as an element of a larger debate...

International trade negotiations have traditionally been viewed as a two-level political bargain between trading nations and among domestic interest groups. While this bargaining model is helpful for predicting the political dynamics in trade negotiations, its focus on politics tends to obscure...

Over the years, the substantive content of international investment agreements (IIAs) has shifted to reflect political change and to respond to lessons learnt in investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). With a focus on eight IIAs, selected with a view to geographical representativeness, this...