Law Commons^™

No Outsourcing Of Law? Wto Law As Practiced By Wto Courts, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

This article provides a critical assessment of the corpus of law that the adjudicating bodies of the World Trade Organization (WTO) – the Appellate Body (AB) and panels – have used since the organization was established on January 1, 1995. After presenting a taxonomy of WTO law, I move to discern, and to provide a critical assessment of, the philosophy of the WTO adjudicating bodies, when called to interpret it. In discussing the law that WTO adjudicating bodies have used, I distinguish between sources of WTO law and interpretative elements. This distinction will be explicated in part I below. Part …

Afterword: The Question Of Linkage, Jagdish N. Bhagwati

Faculty Scholarship

Commenting on the papers in this symposium is paradoxically a difficult task. The authorsare remarkably distinguished and one can only learn from what they write. Indeed, I have learned much from them (especially from Dean David Leebron's splendid clarification of several aspects of linkage, a paper that shows that he should have been an Oxford philosopher if only he had not been such a successful legal scholar). Yet it is easy for an invited commentator to be overwhelmed by despair because the authors write for the most part as if in a research vacuum. There is little attempt at relating …

It's A Question Of Market Access, Kyle W. Bagwell, Robert W. Staiger, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

In this paper, we argue that market access issues associated with the question of the optimal mandate of the World Trade Organization should be separated from nonmarket access issues. We identify race-to-the-bottom and regulatory-chill concerns as market access issues and suggest that the WTIO should address these concerns. We then describe ways that WTO principles and procedures might be augmented to do so. As for nonmarket access issues, we argue that as a general matter these are best handled outside the WTO, and that, while implicit links might be encouraged, explicit links between the WTO and other labor and environmental …

The Wto Legal System: Sources Of Law, David Palmeter, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

Modern discussions of the sources of international law usually begin with a reference to Article 38 (1) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which provides:

The Court, whose function is to decide in accordance with international law such disputes as are submitted to it, shall apply:

1. international conventions, whether general or particular, establishing rules expressly recognized by the contesting states;
2. international custom as evidence of a general practice accepted as law;
3. the general principles of law recognized by civilized nations;
4. subject to the provisions of Article 59, judicial decisions and the teachings of the most highly …