Once the Doha Round is concluded, or officially dead, the time will be ripe for a long term reflection on the future of the world trading system. The world has changed dramatically since the GATT's creation in 1947. Yet, 60 years later, the WTO has not adapted itself to these changes. Although...

Positioning the WTO treaty in relation to other international legal instruments and tribunals is a complex, multi-faceted challenge on which reasoned opinions diverge. This contribution (i) describes how answering the question is, to some extent, an “interpretation choice”, (ii) summarizes...

An increasing number of fora and networks have been recognised to play a role in international or transnational normative processes. While lawmaking by formal, intergovernmental international organizations received abundant attention over the past years, we know less about a phenomenon that this...

Traditional international law and its instruments are stagnating both in terms of quantity and quality. New, alternative forms of cross-border cooperation, in particular processes of informal international lawmaking, have emerged and gained prominence since the 2000s in response to an...

Globalization as well as global governance, especially since the 1990s, has suffered from an imbalance to the detriment of labor, and in favor of the free flow of goods, services and capital (benefitting disproportionately capital as compared to labor). More recently, however, some re-balancing...

One of Professor Jackson's many legacies is his role in moving the international trade system from a “power-oriented” to a “rule-oriented” regime. The core feature and underlying goal of a “rule-oriented structure”, Professor Jackson explains, is “creating greater predictability,...

This contribution focuses on sources of law in Word Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement rather than sources of international trade or international economic law more broadly. Section II illustrates how, from a certain perspective, the sources of WTO law are relatively uncontroversial,...

In this paper we assess the quality and coherence of the use of economics in dispute settlement in two fields of international economic law: international trade and international investment law. We argue that four economic concepts are frequently used and/or of critical importance for both...

With the Doha round in trouble, the so-called spaghetti bowl of multilateral trade rules and proliferating regional trade deals, is, once again, prominently on the radar screen of the international trade community. Perfect examples of this image are the longstanding US-Canada softwood lumber and...