Reflections on the last three years of the WTO

2005 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 367-378
Author(s):  
SUPACHAI PANITCHPAKDI

The multilateral trading system has been an astonishing achievement in international economic cooperation. The power of trade to raise living standards is widely recognized and so too is the capacity for trade tensions to escalate with severe economic consequences and also repercussions that go way beyond economics. As many have observed, when trade cannot cross boarders, then armies will. For these reasons, the World Trade Organization (WTO) is one of the most indispensable international organizations that exists today. It is a system based upon the rule of law and not the law of the jungle, equipped with appropriate legal instruments to defuse and resolve trade conflicts as well as providing a forum for Member governments to negotiate trade rules and trade liberalization.

2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 409-411
Author(s):  
DEBRA P. STEGER

John Jackson pioneered international trade law, helped to establish the WTO, and taught legions of professors and trade policy officials who continue to promote his goals of a multilateral trading system based on the rule of law, transparency, fairness, and non-discrimination. A great man, he was also a very dear man – humble, quiet, unassuming, kind, and private. In his writings, he had the unique ability to distill very complex issues down to a few, readily comprehensible paragraphs for students and readers.


2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (01) ◽  
pp. 47-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dimitri Van Den Meerssche

AbstractIn recent years, the academic field of international institutional law has taken a clear ‘constitutional’ turn. In this normative endeavour, liberal ‘rule of law’ ideals are being reinvigorated, translated and projected onto international organizations. This article trades this well-trodden path for a socio-legal inquiry into how the ‘rule of law’ is produced, practiced and performed in the everyday political and operational life of one specific international organization (the World Bank) during one contentious historical episode. To grasp what it means for ‘law to rule’, I argue, we need to expand our archives to the daily praxis of legality: the actors that embody it; the consciousness that drives it; the politics that rely on it; and the fragile institutional balances that give it meaning. Grounded in this pragmatist perspective, I retrace the intervention of legal expertise during the Bank’s turn to state reform in the wake of the Cold War. Descending from principles to practices, from norms to acts, from abstract heights to situated performances, the article not only strives for an enhanced understanding of the ‘rule of law’ within the World Bank, but also aims at a critical methodological intervention in the field of international institutional law.


2018 ◽  
Vol 112 ◽  
pp. 253-255
Author(s):  
Frauke Lachenmann ◽  
Astrid Wiik

The theme of the 2018 ASIL Annual Meeting was “International Law in Practice,” and nowhere does international law become more practical than in the attempt to rebuild and/or stabilize fragile and post-conflict states through the means of law. Over the last two decades, the rule of law has become a veritable panacea for the international community. As the World Justice Project claimed in 2014, “[w]here the rule of law is weak, medicines fail to reach health facilities, criminal violence goes unchecked, laws are applied unequally across societies, and foreign investments are held back.” The rule of law is no longer just a political ideal of checking power, it is also increasingly “a transnational industry worth multiple billions of dollars.” Multiple state donors, international organizations and nongovernmental organizations are involved in the business of building the rule of law.


Author(s):  
T. Romanova ◽  
E. Pavlova

The article examines how the normative power, which the EU puts forward as an ideological basis of its actions in the world, manifests itself in the national partnerships for modernization between Russia and EU member states. The authors demonstrate the influence of the EU’s normativity on its approach to modernization as well as the difference in the positions of its member countries. It is concluded that there is no unity in the EU’s approach to democracy, human rights and the rule of law, and the new classification of EU member states, which is based on their readiness to act in accordance with the Union’s concept of normative power, is offered.


2006 ◽  
Vol 96 (3) ◽  
pp. 877-895 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle Bagwell ◽  
Robert W Staiger

We provide a first formal analysis of the international rules that govern the use of subsidies to domestic production. Our analysis highlights the impact of the new subsidy disciplines that were added to GATT rules with the creation of the WTO. While GATT subsidy rules were typically viewed as weak and inadequate, our results suggest that the key changes introduced by the WTO subsidy rules may ultimately do more harm than good to the multilateral trading system by undermining the ability of tariff negotiations to serve as the mechanism for expanding market access to more efficient levels.


1999 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olufemi Taiwo

These are the best of times for the Rule of Law. In all parts of the world, states, governments, and individuals, have found in the rule of law, at various times, a rallying cry, a principle of social ordering that promises the dawn of a just society that its supporters in Euro-American democracies claim to be its crowning glory, or a set of practices that is a sine qua non of a good society. The pursuit of the ideal is nothing new: after all, even those states where it was observed more often in its breach always paid lip service to it. And the defunct socialist countries of Eastern Europe, while they existed, could not escape its lure even as they sought to give it a different nomenclature—socialist legality. The movement towards the rule of law has accelerated after the collapse of Soviet communism and its foster progeny in different parts of the world. Given the present momentum towards the rule of law and the widespread enthusiasm with which it is being embraced and pursued at the global level, some would consider it somewhat churlish for anyone to inject any note of doubt or caution. This is more so when such a note emanates from Marxist quarters. But that is precisely what I wish to do in this essay. Although I do not intend to rain on the rule of law’s entire parade, I surely propose to rain on a segment of it: the Marxist float. I propose to look at the issue within the context of the Marxist politico-philosophical tradition.


2007 ◽  
Vol 8 (9) ◽  
pp. 903-914 ◽  
Author(s):  
Güne Okuyucu-Ergün

Corruption poses an increasingly serious threat against Turkey as well as the rest of the world in many respects. The fight against corruption is crucial, in particular, to achieve an economic and political stability, to attract foreign investors and to establish the rule of law. In addition to those interests, which are common for almost all countries, anti-corruption has a particular importance for Turkey in the achievement of its goal of becoming a European Union member, since anti-corruption is expected to feature prominently in Turkey's talks on European Union accession.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sudha N. Setty

Published: Sudha Setty, Obama's National Security Exceptionalism, 91 CHI.-KENT L. REV. 91 (2016).This Article discusses how continued national security exceptionalism engenders a view of the United States as considering itself to be above international obligations to investigate and prosecute torturers and war criminals, and the view by the global community that the United States is willing to apply one standard for itself, and another for the rest of the world. Exceptionalism not only poses real challenges in terms of law, morality, and building useful relationships with allied nations, but acts as a step backward for the creation of enforceable international norms and standards, and in efforts to restore a balance in the rule of law when it comes to national security matters.


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