U.S. assertion of political power in the World Trade Organization (WTO)'s appointment process reminds us of the tenuous balance that exists between state power, adjudication and legitimacy in WTO dispute settlement. Even more fundamentally, it prompts questions about whether reformation of...

International investment law is undergoing a time of reflection, review and revision. Increasing dissatisfaction with the functioning of the current system that governs the protection of international investment and the wish to ensure that investment is channelled towards sustainable development...

In Philippines - Distilled Spirits, the Appellate Body of the WTO reaffirmed that the determination of 'likeness' in the GATT should be about the competitive relationship between products. A coherent methodology for the determination of 'likeness' has finally begun to emerge, with the same...

A long-standing debate questions whether the World Trade Organization's (“WTO”) formal dispute settlement procedures level the playing field for lower income countries in international trade disputes, or instead, merely give opportunistic and sophisticated countries complex rules that they...

The WTO panel decision upholding Australia's tobacco plain packaging (TPP) measures is the culmination of a series of national and international legal challenges brought against Australia's tobacco control measures since their introduction in 2011. In what has been called "one of the most highly...

The chapter begins by describing how a handful of recent cases pertaining to IP issues in the context of investor-State dispute settlement (ISDS) have generated considerable interest in the interface between investment and intellectual property. It suggests that it may be useful to take a...

The paper argues that focusing only on disputes <I>formally raised</I> in the WTO Dispute Settlement system underestimates the extent of trade conflict resolution within the WTO. Both the SPS and TBT Committees address a significant number of ‘specific trade concerns' (STCs) that in the overwhelming...</i>

The 'problem' of overlapping international disputes has long vexed scholars and adjudicators. This article addresses an increasingly important form of overlap that has begun to emerge: parallel or successive disputes before the World Trade Organization (WTO) and investor-state arbitral...

In this paper we claim that, in the WTO Appellate Body (AB)'s ruling in US-Countervailing Measures (China), the AB decision has essentially left unchanged the practice of imposing countervailing duties (CVDs) on environmental goods. While the US has formally “lost” the case, a change in the...