The WTO has just finished two and one half years of negotiations on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health, with an additional tranche of negotiations scheduled to commence soon. These negotiations have been extraordinarily instructive on the subject of trade diplomacy and the means by which ends...

The Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS Agreement) may apply to budgetary measures if they are motivated by SPS concerns. Equivalence-based measures are subject to the regular disciplines of the SPS Agreement, including but not limited to Article 4 SPS. This...

‘International distribution justice’, not ‘most favored nation’ (MFN), is the appropriate core principle to govern a law of obligations such as that of the World Trade Organization (WTO). The international distributive justice principle delivers opportunity for economic development...

There is an emerging consensus that the WTO is in grave need of institutional redesign. For the last fifteen years, questions of WTO institutional reform have been framed as a matter of improving the WTO’s legitimacy. This Article suggests that thinking about WTO redesign as a matter of...

The World Trade Organization has recently seen a spate of disputes over provisions in an unfamiliar instrument, the Protocol of Accession. While the process of accession to the WTO is traditionally an intensely political, secretive and often protracted one, the focus of my research is on the...

This chapter introduces the general and security exceptions in Articles XX and XXI of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade 1994 (‘GATT 1994’) and Articles XIV and XIV bis of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (‘GATS’). The general exceptions are key provisions of the GATT...

An examination of some of the recent decisions of the panels and Appellate Body demonstrates the continuing evolution of WTO trade rules through traditional processes of treaty interpretation, reference to earlier jurisprudence and judicial reasoning. The quasi-judicial development of the law in...

Corruption (the abuse of entrusted authority for illicit gain) is pervasive, hard to measure, and damaging both to economic growth and human rights. Corruption is also intimately associated with trade. However, the international organization governing trade, the WTO, says nothing about...