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Full-Text Articles in Law

Trips And Bits: An Essay On Compulsory Licenses, Expropriation, And International Arbitration, Peter B. Rutledge Jun 2012

Trips And Bits: An Essay On Compulsory Licenses, Expropriation, And International Arbitration, Peter B. Rutledge

Scholarly Works

This essay examines the potential for arbitration to resolve disputes between private companies and developing countries over the propriety of compulsory licenses. At bottom, my thesis is that arbitration supplies the medium through which to mediate the tension between the profit-seeking goals of private multinational companies and the development goals of foreign nations, especially in the developing world. The compulsory license debate raises a clash of fundamental interests between the patent holder, the patent holder’s state, and the host state. Arbitration can play an important role in balancing those interests, albeit a highly unusual one. Arbitration provides an essential forum …


Carving Out Policy Autonomy For Developing Countries In The World Trade Organization: The Experience Of Brazil And Mexico, Alvaro Santos Jan 2012

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 …


Arbitrating Trade Disputes (Who's The Boss?), Petros C. Mavroidis Jan 2012

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 Jan 2012

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 …