Law Commons^™

When The Wto Works, And How It Fails, Anu Bradford

Faculty Scholarship

This Article seeks to explain when an international legal framework like the WTO can facilitate international cooperation and when it fails to do so. Using an empirical inquiry into different agreements that the WTO has attempted to facilitate — specifically, intellectual property and antitrust regulation — it reveals more general principles about why the WTO can facilitate agreement in some situations and not in others. Comparing the successful conclusion of the TRIPS Agreement and the failed attempts to negotiate a WTO antitrust agreement indicates that international cooperation is likely to emerge when the interests of powerful states align and when …