Law Commons^™

The Political Economy Of Wto Exceptions, Timothy Meyer

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In a bid to save the planet from rising temperatures, the European Union is introducing a carbon border adjustment mechanism-essentially a levy on imports from countries with weak climate rules. The United States, Canada, and Japan are all openly mulling similar proposals. The Biden Administration is adopting new Buy American rules, while countries around the world debate new supply chain regulations to address public health issues arising from COVID-19 and shortages in critical components like computer chips. These public policy initiatives-addressing the central environmental, public health, and economic issues of the day-all likely violate World Trade Organization (WTO) rules governing …

How To Treat The Wto's Problem With Precedent, Timothy Meyer

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article argues that the World Trade Organization's Appellate Body (AB), or a successor body, must become more transparent in justifying its decision to rely (or not) on prior decisions. The AB's practice of precedent-which the United States cited as a cause of its decision to paralyze the AB by blocking new appointments-is similar to how it has approached "likeness" in nondiscrimination cases. It placed a lot of weight on whether two cases (or products) are sufficiently similar to be compared, and it spent relatively less time substantively justifying its treatment of prior cases. Because the WTO does not have …

The Due Process And Other Constitutional Rights Of Foreign Nations, Ingrid Wuerth

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The rights of foreign states under the U.S. Constitution are becoming more important as the actions of foreign states and foreign state-owned enterprises expand in scope and the legislative protections to which they are entitled contract. Conventional wisdom and lower court cases hold that foreign states are outside our constitutional order and that they are protected neither by separation of powers nor by due process. As a matter of policy, however, it makes little sense to afford litigation-related constitutional protections to foreign corporations and individuals but to deny categorically such protections to foreign states.

Careful analysis shows that the conventional …

The Future Of The Federal Common Law Of Foreign Relations, Ingrid Wuerth

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The federal common law of foreign relations has been in decline for decades. The field was built in part on the claim that customary international law is federal common law and in part on the claim that federal judges should displace state law when they conclude that it poses difficulties for U.S. foreign relations. Today, however, customary international law is generally applied based upon the implied intentions of Congress, rather than its free-standing status as federal common law, and judicial evaluation of foreign policy problems has largely been replaced by reliance upon presidential or congressional action, or by standard constitutional …

Micro-Offsets And Macro-Transformation: An Inconvenient View Of Climate Change Justice, Michael P. Vandenbergh, Brooke A. Ackerly, Fred E. Forster

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

We have been asked to examine climate change justice by discussing the methods of allocating the costs of addressing climate change among nations. Our analysis suggests that climate and justice goals cannot be achieved by better allocating the emissions reduction burdens of current carbon mitigation proposals — there may be no allocation of burdens using current approaches that achieves both climate and justice goals. Instead, achieving just the climate goal without exacerbating justice concerns, much less improving global justice, will require focusing on increasing well-being and inducing fundamental changes in development patterns to generate greater levels of well-being with reduced …

The Role Of Legal Doctrine In The Decline Of The Islamic Waqf: A Comparison With The Trust, Jeffrey Schoenblum

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The Waqf and the trust have an ancient, intertwined history. However, whereas the Waqf has largely remained a static institution, the trust has proven remarkably flexible and responsive to changing conditions affecting intergenerational management of family wealth and its preservation. While there is a temptation to find clones in legal constructs of different cultures, care must be exercised to avoid simplistic or superficial generalizations. This is true of the Waqf and the trust. It would be intriguing to find comparable wealth administration and preservation constructs in these two great systems of law. This is simply not the case with the …