International Trade Law Commons^™

Sex And Globalization, Berta E. Hernández-Truyol

UF Law Faculty Publications

For some time now, I have focused on a mission to bring together the separate discourses of the human rights and trade fields—certainly not to blend them, but to raise awareness of their myriad interconnections. Indeed, human rights and trade are interlocking pieces of the puzzle we call international law and cannot possibly remain sequestered in the "splendid isolation" in which they have existed since their inception as disciplines. In any study of globalization, especially if one endeavors to pursue its benefits for all persons, not just the elite around the world, one must be aware of and seek to …

Toward A Vibrant Peruvian Middle Class: Effects Of The Peru-United States Free Trade Agreement On Labor Rights, Biodiversity, And Indigenous Populations, Stephen J. Powell, Paola A. Chavarro

UF Law Faculty Publications

Past research confirms that trade and human rights are inextricably linked by trade's effects on poverty, labor, women, indigenous populations, health, and the environment. We identified surprisingly direct linkages between these two vital policies in WTO agreements as well as that regional trade agreements add positive indirect contributions by to rules-based governance through their emphasis on transparency, accountability, and due process by governments, as well as timeliness, inclusive record keeping, and impartiality in the administrative decisional process. The present research examines a particular country and a single trade agreement, Peru and the trade agreement between Peru and the United States. …

Democratization: The Contribution Of Fair Trade And Ethical Trading Movements, Janet Dine

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

De-democratization and institutional corruption threaten equality among the expanding global market community. International treaties have been largely unsuccessful because they are designed to favor the more politically and economically advantaged players. In addition to meeting these challenges, there are many additional benefits to be gained from adopting the principles of the Fair Trade and Ethical Trading movements. Finally, international law has an obligation to integrate the principles of social and ethical trading movements to prevent the autonomous powers and transnational corporations from dominating the traditional, less powerful markets and so that welfare increases for all.

Democracy and the Transnational Private …

Is International Trade A Substitute For Migration?, Robert J. Carbaugh

All Faculty Scholarship for the College of Business

If a goal of immigration reform is to lessen the flow of unauthorized immigrants into the U.S., could international trade be used to deter immigration rather than adopting legal barriers? The purpose of this paper is to shed some light on this question by considering the theoretical foundations and empirical research regarding the connection between trade and migration.

Culture, Sovereignty, And Hollywood: Unesco And The Future Of Trade In Cultural Products, Christopher M. Bruner

ExpressO

On October 20, 2005, the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) adopted a treaty – by a vote of 148-2, with 4 abstentions – that legitimates domestic legal measures aimed at the protection of local producers of "cultural activities, goods and services." Opposed by the United States and Israel, the Convention represents a major diplomatic victory for Canada and France – its principal proponents – and a major blow to Hollywood and the United States, audiovisual products being among America's most lucrative exports. Both Canada and France, like many countries around the world, have …

Article Iii And Supranational Judicial Review, Henry Paul Monaghan

Faculty Scholarship

With the rise of supranational legislative bodies, the use of supranational adjudicatory bodies has also increased. These adjudicatory bodies have even been allowed to review the domestic law decisions offederal administrative agencies, and their decisions are insulated from any review by Article III courts. These developments have been met by intense opposition. This Article addresses the question whether, as claimed by several writers, the emerging supranational adjudicatory order impermissibly contravenes the "essential attributes of the judicial power established by Article III." Examining two case studies, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Supreme Court's recent decisions regarding Article …

Applicable Law Provisions In International Uniform Commercial Law Conventions, Paolo E. Conci

LLM Theses and Essays

The development of international trade requires predictability and uniformity of the applicable legal framework. Such requirements can be satisfied by means of international uniform commercial law conventions, which try to set forth coherent and uniform bodies of substantial rules. A key role is also played by private international law, an instrument operating at a different level but often included in the uniform conventions themselves. This paper analyzes the relationship between international uniform commercial law conventions and private international law to investigate how it has developed over the last seventy years, and suggests a new approach to international commercial transactions in …

Un-Fair Trade As Friendly Fire: The Australia-Usa Free Trade Agreement, Benedict Sheehy

ExpressO

Trade, economists and trade theorists advise, is a mutually beneficial exercise. Among this group, a particular set of advocates, claim that “Free Trade” is in the interest of all parties. As will be demonstrated, Free Trade is not truly “free” but an exercise of foreign policy and the implementation of policies favouring wealthy corporate interest groups. Free Trade is controlled by wealthy nations who have stacked the rules in favour of themselves, and in particular their corporate interests, and against the poor producers in poor nations. This control is used contrary to fairness, economic and ecological logic. Fair trade, by …

Evaluating The Wto's Two Step Test For Environmental Measures Under Article Xx, Nita Ghei

ExpressO

There has been considerable dissatisfaction expressed by both free trade proponents and environment activists with respect to the WTO’s exercise of authority on the impact of environmental measures on international trade. The Article first sets out a analytical framework, based on public choice theory, which examines the incentives to implement measures to achieve environmental goals which function effectively as disguised barriers to trade. This is followed by a careful examination of the WTO’s jurisprudence in the area, which suggests that the WTO’s focus on the measure being implemented is correct. Furthermore, the two step test under Article XX, as conceived …

Towards A Development-Oriented Multilateral Framework On Competition Policy, Jae Sung Lee

San Diego International Law Journal

The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOSC) is a successful attempt by the international community to codify and unify the law of the sea. After long negotiations, the LOSC opened for signature at the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III) in 1982. Together with its two formal associations, the Part XI Implementation Agreement 1994 and the Straddling and Migratory Fish Stocks Agreement 1995, it is regarded as one of the most comprehensive documents ever adopted by the international community. The LOSC not only succeeded in addressing all topics covered …

Of The Inequals Of The Uruguay Round, Srividhya Ragavan

Faculty Scholarship

Ten years ago, the TRIPs Agreement set a distinct tone in international law by requiring members to prioritize international trade obligations as a means to achieve national goals. Within the next five years, the AIDS crisis highlighted that compromising pressing national responsibilities - like a looming public health crisis - to fulfill international obligations may, in fact, detrimentally affect international trade. Meanwhile, access to medication continues to be an unresolved issue even as we celebrate the tenth anniversary of TRIPs and the end of the transitional period. This Article suggests that the success of TRIPs depends on its ability to …

Rule-Based Dispute Resolution In International Trade Law, Rachel Brewster

Faculty Scholarship

Why does the United States ever prefer to settle disputes under a system of rules rather than a system of negotiations? Powerful states are advantaged by negotiation-based approaches to settling disagreements because they have the resources to resolve individual disputes on favorable terms. By contrast, rule-based dispute resolution advantages weak states as a means to hold powerful states to the terms of their agreements. Then why did the United States want a rule-based system to settle international disputes in the WTO? To answer this question, we have to understand domestic politics as well as international politics. International constraints, particularly international …

Book Review. Companies, International Trade And Human Rights By Janet Dine, Christiana Ochoa

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This is a book review of Janet Dine's Companies, International Trade and Human Rights (2005). While this 9-page review is quite positive, it does offer some criticisms of Dine's analysis and views.

Labor As Property: Guestworkers, International Trade, And The Democracy Deficit, Ruben J. Garcia

Scholarly Works

In the 1914 Clayton Act, Congress declared: "The labor of a human being is not a commodity or an article of commerce." The practical reason for this section of the Clayton Act was to exempt collusion in labor negotiations from antitrust liability. The law also gave effect to the rejection of the commodification of human labor. Since the passage of the Clayton Act, developments in law and society have chipped away at the law's symbolic anti-commodification message. This paper examines the commodification of labor in the international trade and guestworker debates. Historically, the concept of "comparative advantage" in international trade …

Services As Objects Of International Trade: Bartering The Legal Profession, Louise L. Hill

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The General Agreement on Trade in Service calls for members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to further liberalize and expand opportunities for international trade in services. With legal services included in this mandate, requests for specific commitments and offers have been made by WTO Member States. While services as components of international trade is new to many of the WTO Member States, free movement of services has been addressed by the European Union (EU) since the inception of the European Economic Community. Thus EU directives, declarations, codes and case law serve as valuable resources to WTO Member States as …

Motion Picture Piracy: Controlling The Seemingly Endless Supply Of Counterfeit Optical Discs In Taiwan, Stephen K. Shiu

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Annually, Hollywood loses roughly $3.5 billion dollars in revenue to optical disc piracy in Taiwan. Optical disc piracy involves the camcording or copying of motion pictures onto laserdiscs, digital versatile discs, or video compact discs. Through the U.S. Trade Representative's satellite enforcement offices in Taiwan and coordination with the Taiwanese legislature and enforcement agencies, the U.S. motion picture companies have been able to influence some change in the frequency and severity of optical disc piracy in Taiwan. This can be mainly attributed to the Motion Picture Association of America's alliance with the U.S. Trade Representative in placing Taiwan on numerous …

Trade And Morality: Preserving "Public Morals" Without Sacrificing The Global Economy, Miguel A. Gonzalez

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The World Trade Organization (WTO) exists for the purpose of promoting and facilitating trade amongst its member nations. When those member nations acceded to the WTO's agreements, however, they acknowledged that sometimes trade barriers are useful tools in protecting themselves from certain evils. This Note addresses one of those useful tools--the public morals exception--which allows a member nation to maintain trade barriers with respect to certain goods or services.

Since the WTO agreements have been in effect, the public morals has lacked two critical things.: a definition and boundaries. This Note will attempt to define the public morals exception in …

Intellectual Property, Trade & Development: The State Of Play, Daniel J. Gervais

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article considers, first, available economic, social, and cultural analyses of the impact of intellectual property protection in developing countries. Economics provides a useful set of analytical tools and are directly relevant, in particular since the successfully arranged marriage of IP and trade rules after which it became inevitable that IP rules would be measured using an economic yardstick. The Paper also considers the claim that making proper intellectual property policy is impossible or inherently unreliable because theoretical models are inadequate or valid empirical data unavailable. Against this backdrop, the Article then examines the emergence of the World Trade Organization …

Hollywood's Disappearing Act: International Trade Remedies To Bring Hollywood Home, Claire Wright

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

Bilateralism Under The World Trade Organization, Y.S. Lee

ExpressO

This paper addresses fundamental issues in the legal framework for international trade today, namely the proliferation of bilateralism under the multilateral framework of the GATT/WTO system. The GATT/WTO system requires non-discriminatory treatment in trade relations among all nations, but bilateral/regional trade arrangements that provide exclusive trade preferences have increased in recent years. This paper examines the consistency of these bilateral/regional arrangements with the requirements of WTO disciplines and explores the ways to achieve convergence between bilateralism and multilateralism in international trade today.

European Union Food Law Update, Nicole Coutrelis

Journal of Food Law & Policy

The purpose of this update is to present the main events that have taken place each six months in the food law sector in the European Union (E.U.). This presentation will cover June through December 2004, but is not exhaustive. This update will not include detailed discussions of regulations, such as authorizations of new additives for animal feed or registrations of new geographic names. Instead it will concentrate on fundamental topics and focus on food, which excludes from our scope questions regarding the management of agricultural products (Common Agricultural Policy, or CAP). However, some questions which legally pertain to the …

From St. Ives To Cyberspace: The Modern Distortion Of The Medieval 'Law Merchant', Stephen E. Sachs

ExpressO

Modern advocates of corporate self-regulation have drawn unlikely inspiration from the Middle Ages. On the traditional view of history, medieval merchants who wandered from fair to fair were not governed by domestic laws, but by their own lex mercatoria, or "law merchant." This law, which uniformly regulated commerce across Europe, was supposedly produced by an autonomous merchant class, interpreted in private courts, and enforced through private sanctions rather than state coercion. Contemporary writers have treated global corporations as descendants of these itinerant traders, urging them to replace conflicting national laws with a law of their own creation. The standard history …

A Dual Catastrophe Of Protectionism, Sungjoon Cho

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

Suppose that a consortium of wealthy and powerful local industries, acting through lawmakers captured by these industries, managed to pass a statute, damaging to the larger public welfare, purely for a protectionist purpose. Suppose further that this statute victimizes exports from a small, poor country such as Vietnam, to a large, rich country such as the United States, because these imported products are cheaper and thus pose a competitive threat to rival domestic industries. Suppose also that courts in the importing country can do little to stop this chain of events. Rational individuals might find these events objectionable, if not …

Meaning, Ambiguity And Legitimacy: Judicial (Re-)Construction Of Nafta Chapter 11, Ari Afilalo

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) benignly named the "Investment Chapter," is a theater for some of the most advanced issues of 21st century international law and adjudication. The Chapter gives private parties the right to challenge national policies that burden their ability to do business freely. It empowers arbitral tribunals to assess damages against the governments of NAFTA parties. The adjudicators, as this Article illustrates, render opinions with a constitutional flavor in that they assess the validity of domestic norms against larger principles of international economic law. In a drastic move away from classical century …

General Exclusion Orders Under Section 337, Gary M. Hnath

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

Your company, Widgets Unlimited, imports foreign-made widgets into the United States. One day, you're informed that U.S. Customs & Border Protection (Customs) has detained your goods and is determining whether they infringe a patent owned by The American Widget Corporation, based on an exclusion order issued by the International Trade Commission (ITC) after a recent ITC investigation, titled Certain Widgets with Extra Shiny Surfaces. Since you were never a party to any proceeding at the ITC, and indeed, you never even knew American Widget had patents on its widgets, you conclude that there must be some mistake and wait for …

The $4 Billion Question: An Analysis Of Congressional Responses To The Fsc/Eti Dispute Under Wto Export Subsidy Standards, William Chou

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

During the decade-long relationship between the United States and the World Trade Organization (WTO), perhaps no controversy has fomented as long and bitterly as the dispute over the U.S. tax benefits for exporters. This article analyzes two competing bills before the House of Representatives, both devised to bring the United States in compliance with the WTO's ruling against the U.S. Foreign Sale Corporation (FSC) and Exterritorial Income (ETI) tax regimes as prohibited export subsidies. Hit with a $4 billion retaliatory tariff by the European Union, the House sought new tax legislation that would preserve at least some of the tax …

Convergence: Challenges, Controversies And Collaboration, David Van Zandt

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

In this Symposium issue, the Northwestern Journal of International Law and Business has brought together seven outstanding commentators on the possibilities, complexities and controversies of convergence.

International Trade Agreements: Vehicle For Better Public Health?, David P. Fidler, Jason Sapsin, Ann Marie Kimball

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Linking The Rule Of Law And Trade Liberalization In Jamaica, Rachel J. Anderson

Scholarly Works

Jamaica is one of several smaller countries that hope to improve their position in the global market, raise living standards, and strengthen democracy through trade liberalization. Adapting David Dollar's cycles of good governance, this article argues that sustainable trade liberalization, rule of law, and democracy are linked and that sustainable success in one area requires contemporaneous progress in the other two. It concludes that improving the rule of law in Jamaica is necessary for sustainable trade liberalization.

Against Sustainable Development Grand Theory: A Plea For Pragmatism In Resolving Disputes Involving International Trade And The Environment, Robert F. Blomquist

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.