Law Commons^™

New Frontiers In The Relationship Between National And European Courts, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

Considering that a full fifty years have passed since the Treaty Establishing the European Community came into force, it seems appropriate to take a "long" view of the subject of this panel, namely, national courts and the courts of the European Union. I mean here to sketch the evolution, as I see it, of the challenge that consists of managing the "interface" between these two series of courts.

The central question pervading this discussion is simply stated: whether and to what extent the European Court of Justice ("Court of Justice" or "Court") (and the European institutions more generally) can count …

Come Together? Producer Welfare, Consumer Welfare, And Wto Rules, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter explains why the dynamic of World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations tends to lead to the progressive liberalization of market-access barriers promoting consumer welfare. As all agreements tend to be ‘incomplete’, it is a legitimate task of WTO judges to clarify progressively the WTO requirements of nondiscriminatory treatment of like goods and of like services. The additional requirements, in the WTO Agreements on Technical Barriers to Trade and on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Standards, to base restrictive measures on the ‘necessity principle’ and on ‘scientific evidence’, offer useful ‘double checks’ for judicial identification of protectionist measures. While the WTO rules …

Introduction: The European Union As An International Actor, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

The notorious ERTA decision by the European Court of Justice (ECJ), if viewed from a federalist perspective independently of its legal merits, represents an equilibrium: the quantity of the sovereignty transferred from European Community (EC) Member States to the Community at the internal (intra-EC) level equals the quantity of sovereignty that the Community can exercise on behalf of the EC Member States on the international scene.

The ECJ's Opinion 1/94 casts some doubt upon this statement by restrictively interpreting the Community competence with respect to international trade negotiations. Opinion 1/94, however, is not a drastic departure from the ERTA case …

Dispute Settlement Procedures And Mechanisms, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

The role that the World Trade Organization (WTO) plays in the settlement of United States-Japan trade disputes is, but should not be, U.S. and Japan-specific. The WTO is a multilateral forum and this aspect of its character must be maintained for the WTO to acquire credibility in the settlement of trade disputes. Trade disputes, if at all, should be exceptional not because of the parties involved, but because of their subject matter. Nothing indicates that the U.S.-Japan trade disputes are subject matter-specific. In fact, the opposite is true: there is ample evidence demonstrating that disputes over the same issues among …

The European Intergovernmental Conference: An American Perspective, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

Peter Herzog's career-long interest in the European Communities makes it especially appropriate to include in this festschrift a contribution on what has become the principal mechanism for reforming the treaties that constitute those Communities. I refer of course to the "intergovernmental conferences," or "IGCs" for short. As this festschrift goes to press, the fifteen Member States are submitting the results of the latest IGC – the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam – to their respective national ratification processes.

As its name suggests, the intergovernmental conference is a gathering of representatives of the Member States to discuss and eventually agree upon amendments …

Regulatory Federalism: A Reprise And Introduction, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

This colloquium, like its predecessor, proceeds on the basis of a series of assumptions. First, it assumes that the federalism dimension of the regulatory state is an important one Gust as is the regulatory dimension of the federal state). In introducing our first colloquium, I suggested that, although determining the content of public policy is critical in a democratic society, also critical is determining the level of government at which the choice of policy is made. Ingolf Pernice remarked then that a federal system is "any legal entity [which is] comprised of states for the purpose of pursuing certain common …

European Community Law From A U.S. Perspective, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

Although less than forty years have passed since the founding of the European Economic Community (now the European Community), the lifetime of the Community is well marked temporally. The term of each Commission furnishes a convenient time-line for measuring the Community's progress in legal integration. Since the 1970s, each year has been punctuated by two or more "summit" meetings of heads of state or government. These summits not only are key markings in their own right, but also furnish an occasion for additional monitoring of the Community's state of health. Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, the Community submitted …

Surveillance Schemes: The Gatt's New Trade Policy Review Mechanism, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

In 1986 the Contracting Parties to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) launched the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations, the most ambitious round of trade negotiations to date. The Contracting Parties to the GATT agreed in the Punta Del Este Declaration to introduce into the GATT system three new sectors for negotiation: services, trade-related intellectual property rights (TRIPs), and trade-related investment measures (TRIMs). In addition, for the first time in GATT history, the Contracting Parties agreed to devote a negotiating group exclusively to negotiating the tricky aspects of international trade in agricultural products. Another goal of the …

Computer Programs In Europe: A Comparative Analysis Of The 1991 Ec Software Directive, Jerome Huet, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

Long awaited – if not feared – in the computer industry, where its elaboration had evoked heated debate, the European Council Directive of May 14, 1991 on the Legal Protection of Computer Programs (the "Directive" or "Software Directive")has imposed common principles of copyright protection on the twelve Member States of the European Community (the "EC", the "Community"). As it declares in its preamble, the Directive responds to the need to ensure the proper functioning of a single marketand, to that end, to eliminate man), of the current differences among the Member States' legal systems.

In the domain of European copyright …

The International Trading System, Jagdish N. Bhagwati

Faculty Scholarship

The 25th Anniversary of the founding of UNCTAD is an occasion to remember, not for its failures, which it shares inevitably with every international organization that is set up to address complex economic issues that concern developing countries with diverse constraints and objectives, but for its successes, which have been unduly neglected.

Here, I shall recount only three of the many intellectual accomplishments focusing on the early lead that UNCTAD has provided on questions that have attracted academic attention and invited policy redress in national and international fora.