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SelectedWorks

Joel P Trachtman

Selected Works

International Trade

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in Law

International Legal Control Of Domestic Administrative Action, Joel P. Trachtman Feb 2014

International Legal Control Of Domestic Administrative Action, Joel P. Trachtman

Joel P Trachtman

International law increasingly is designed to constrain the regulatory activities of countries where these activities have external effects on other countries. While countries retain the right to regulate, it is a qualified right, with a number of restrictions under international trade, investment, finance, human rights, and other areas of international law. The restrictions are often nuanced: while maintaining maximum policy autonomy, countries agree to international legal rules that establish increasingly complex preconditions for national regulatory action. In some cases, preconditions are formulated so as to establish procedural, as distinguished from substantive, predicates for national action. These varying types of preconditions …


Fragmentation And Coherence In International Law, Joel P. Trachtman Aug 2011

Fragmentation And Coherence In International Law, Joel P. Trachtman

Joel P Trachtman

With the increasing scope and density of international law, we will observe increasing instances of fragmentation. Fragmentation is not necessarily a problem, insofar as there may be no need for coordination among different legal regimes. But where it does raise issues of conflict, or presents opportunities for synergy, it is useful to inquire whether fragmentation might be managed in a way that would reduce inefficient conflict, or harvest synergies. The existing formal system for management, provided in the VCLT, is quite limited in its response, and the outcomes that it produces would not necessarily be substantively satisfactory. This article reviews …


Interpretation And Institutional Choice At The Wto, Joel P. Trachtman Mar 2011

Interpretation And Institutional Choice At The Wto, Joel P. Trachtman

Joel P Trachtman

This article develops a new framework of comparative institutional analysis for assessing the implications of judicial interpretation in the World Trade Organization (WTO). The analytical framework offers an improved means to describe and assess the consequences of choices made in treaty drafting and interpretation in terms of social welfare and participation in social decision-making. The analysis builds from specific examples from WTO case law. Our framework approaches treaty drafting and judicial interpretive choices through a comparative institutional lens — that is, in comparison with the implications of alternative drafting and interpretive choices for social welfare and participation in social decision-making …


International Law And Domestic Political Coalitions: The Grand Theory Of Compliance With International Law, Joel P. Trachtman Feb 2010

International Law And Domestic Political Coalitions: The Grand Theory Of Compliance With International Law, Joel P. Trachtman

Joel P Trachtman

Compliance with international law is always dependent upon a domestic political decision to engage in the behavior that constitutes compliance. This article articulates the importance of the interdependence between home state domestic politics and foreign state domestic politics in determining compliance. International legal commitments allow the formation of domestic coalitions between those who will benefit by their own state’s compliance with the international legal rule in question, and those who will benefit from other states’ compliance with the international legal rule. The theory developed in this paper is based on established approaches to international relations in the political science literature, …