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Full-Text Articles in Law
The 2012 Us Model Bit And What The Changes (Or Lack Thereof) Suggest About Future Investment Treaties, Lise Johnson
The 2012 Us Model Bit And What The Changes (Or Lack Thereof) Suggest About Future Investment Treaties, Lise Johnson
Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications
In April of this year the US State Department released a new version of its model bilateral investment treaty (BIT). This text, like the various models the US has used over roughly the past 3 decades, represents the US’s basic policy position when it starts negotiations on investment treaties with other countries, and is therefore an important benchmark for the outcome US investors might hope for as a result of ongoing and potential future talks with countries such as China, Russia, and India. Overall, this new model text follows the approach taken by the US in its investment treaties over …
Arbitrating Trade Disputes (Who's The Boss?), Petros C. Mavroidis
Arbitrating Trade Disputes (Who's The Boss?), Petros C. Mavroidis
Faculty Scholarship
World Trade Organization (“WTO”) dispute settlement has attracted a lot of interest over the years and there is a plethora of academic papers focusing on various aspects of this system. Paradoxically, there is little known about the identity of the WTO judges: since, at the end of the day, the WTO has evolved into the busiest forum litigating state-to-state disputes. There are many writings regarding the appointment process in other international tribunals. At the risk of doing injustice to many papers on this issue, we should mention the following works: Terris et al. look at various courts and especially those …
One (Firm) Is Not Enough: A Legal-Economic Analysis Of Ec-Fasteners, Chad P. Brown, Petros C. Mavroidis
One (Firm) Is Not Enough: A Legal-Economic Analysis Of Ec-Fasteners, Chad P. Brown, Petros C. Mavroidis
Faculty Scholarship
The WTO’s Appellate Body (AB) dealt with a number of issues for the first time in the Report of EC-Fasteners. Importantly, the AB discussed the consistency of the European Union (EU) regulation with the multilateral rules on the conditions for deviating from the obligation to calculate individual dumping margins. Although China formally won the argument, the AB may have opened the door to treat China as a non-market economy (NME) even beyond 2016 when China’s NME-status was thought to expire under the terms of China’s 2001 WTO Accession Protocol. The AB further dealt with numerous other issues ranging from statistical …
Free Lunches? Wto As Public Good, And The Wto's View Of Public Goods, Petros C. Mavroidis
Free Lunches? Wto As Public Good, And The Wto's View Of Public Goods, Petros C. Mavroidis
Faculty Scholarship
The WTO can be viewed as a public good in that it provides a forum for negotiations which also produces the necessary legal framework to act as a support for agreed liberalization. To avoid any misunderstandings, in this article the discussion focuses on the WTO as a forum and a set of agreements, not on free trade. Since the legal agreements coming under its aegis are for good reasons incomplete, the WTO provides an additional public good by ‘completing’ the original contract through case law. The importance of this feature increases over time as tariffs are driven towards irrelevance. In …
Dissent As Dialectic: Horizontal And Vertical Disagreement In Wto Dispute Settlement, Meredith Kolsky Lewis
Dissent As Dialectic: Horizontal And Vertical Disagreement In Wto Dispute Settlement, Meredith Kolsky Lewis
Journal Articles
This article examines the phenomena of dissent within WTO dispute settlement panels and within Appellate Body divisions ("horizontal disagreement") and the failure of certain WTO dispute settlement panels to follow previous rulings of the Appellate Body ("vertical disagreement"). With respect to horizontal disagreement, the article responds to a recent critique of my earlier piece on the subject (The Lack of Dissent in WTO Dispute Settlement, 9 J. INT’L ECON. L. 895 (2006)). With respect to vertical disagreement, the article examines whether there are textual or normative reasons why panels should not disagree with the Appellate Body. It argues that the …
Carving Out Policy Autonomy For Developing Countries In The World Trade Organization: The Experience Of Brazil And Mexico, Alvaro Santos
Carving Out Policy Autonomy For Developing Countries In The World Trade Organization: The Experience Of Brazil And Mexico, Alvaro Santos
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Although liberal trade and development scholars disagree about the merits of the World Trade Organization (WTO), they both assume that WTO legal obligations restrict states’ regulatory autonomy. This article argues for relaxing this shared assumption by showing that, despite the restrictions imposed by international economic law obligations, states retain considerable flexibility to carve out policy autonomy. The article makes three distinct contributions. First, it analyzes how active WTO members can, through litigation and lawyering, influence rule interpretation to advance their interests. Second, the article redefines the concept of “legal capacity” in the WTO context and introduces the term “developmental legal …