Private initiatives of voluntary certification standards appear to be an attractive alternative to top-down approaches in the field of ICH and development. Over the last 50 years, many different Indigenous communities have attempted to use certification trade marks to promote their authentic...

The debate on the institutional reform and governance of the WTO has now been underway for over fifteen years. In the context of a Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations stumbling forward in fits and starts, the most prominent focus of discussions of WTO reform has been options for...

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...

Despite the looming expiration of the extended transition period under Article 66.1 of the Agreement on Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) on 1 July 2013, most least-developed countries (LDCs) have not made significant progress in implementing the TRIPS Agreement. WTO...

Events of the past few years, including the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom and the demise of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and election of Donald Trump as President in the United States, have reignited debates about the global trade regime. In particular, many have begun to question whether...

Actively ongoing discussions shaping the WTO reform are aimed at solving urgent and systemic issues impeding both the functioning and the progress of the Organization and ensuring the relevance of the multilateral trading system in future. While a number of procedural and substantive suggestions...

This paper argues that mutual recognition at the WTO, as a type of liberalism, must be embedded in a process of governance that has two components. First, mutual recognition can only take place to the extent of satisfactory essential harmonization: to the extent that states can legitimately...

This Essay argues that the current development crisis within the Doha Round is inextricably linked to the nature of modern day trade negotiations. This Round reveals a bargaining process in which the powerful can too easily exploit and prevail over the powerless. This process is also vulnerable...