A Brookings Institution Press and the Center for Business and Government at Harvard University publication The multilateral trading system stands at a crossroads. Despite its widely acknowledged contribution to global prosperity over the past half century, the movement toward further liberalization has increasingly been challenged. These essays by leading scholars and trade officials honor Raymond Vernon, one of the architects of the international economic institutions established following the Second World War. The book examines several key issues at the heart of the debate over the multilateral trading system. What are the global efficiency gains from further liberalization? How can efficiency gains be maximized while respecting legitimate claims to sovereignty? Is the trading system affording an equitable distribution of benefits between countries and among various groups within societies? Does civil society have a role in the trading system? What role should the World Trade Organization and its dispute settlement procedures play in resolving disputes and enhancing legitimacy?

Despite its widely acknowledged contribution to global prosperity over the past half century, the movement toward further liberalization has increasingly been challenged. This collection of essays examine several key issues at the heart of the debate over the multilateral trading system.

This book offers a critical examination of the jurisprudence of the World Trade Organization (WTO) as an emancipatory international social contract on trade. The book suggests that the WTO is an international organization built and operating on member states’ attribution of authority through consent with legislative, administrative, and adjudicative functions – three functions in one triune personality. With a solid constitutional continuity building on GATT experiences, the WTO has successfully made governments accountable to foreign individuals in various capacities either as traders of goods, providers of services, or holders of intellectual property rights within the global marketplace. With a triune personality, the WTO operates within the reign of state primacy – the force – ultimately for the benefits of individuals – the ends – in the global marketplace, and gains a soul of its own in the institutional evolution – the means – of the global trading regime. Although the tripartite dynamics between states, international institutions, and individuals in the global marketplace are unprecedentedly complex, the WTO’s ends of benefiting individuals in the global marketplace has no end. Beyond the critical analysis of WTO’s decision-making by consensus, the book critically examines GATT’s "common intention" treaty interpretation, Antidumping’s NME methodology, TRIPS’ public health concerns, and IP-competition trade policy dynamics. A unified WTO jurisprudence looking at the WTO as an international social contract on trade is therefore proposed to allow a fresh look at the force, the means, and the ends of the constitutional evolution of the global trading regime.

The advent of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995 transformed international economic law for states, enterprises, and nongovernmental organizations. This book analyzes how the WTO is changing the path of international trade law and examines the implications of these trends for the world economy and the global environment. Containing 18 essays published from 1999 to 2011, the book illuminates several of the most complex issues in contemporary trade policy. Among the topics covered are: Is there a normative theory of the WTO's purpose? Can constitutional theory provide guidance to keep the WTO's levers in balance? Should the WTO use trade sanctions for enforcement? What can the WTO do to enhance sustainable development and job creation?

A collection of 13 previously published articles.

Over the past 10 years, the content and application of international trade law has grown dramatically. The WTO created a binding dispute settlement process and in resolving disputes, the judicial organs of the WTO have built up a substantial amount of new international trade law. Emerging from this new WTO process is an international trade law system that is in some respects self-contained and in other respects overlapping and linked to other international legal, economic and political regimes. The 'boundaries' of trade law are now generating enormous interest and controversy which, at a broader level, is subsumed within the debate over globalization. The detailed development of the rules of international trade is being examined with increasing frequency by scholars, government officials and trade law practitioners. But how does it fit with existing systems? How it is modified by them? How does the international trade law system affect and modify other regimes? This Handbook places international trade law within its broader context, providing comment and critique on contemporary thinking on a range of questions both related specifically to the discipline of international trade law itself and to the outside face of international trade law and its intersection with States and other aspects of the international system. It examines the economic and institutional context of the world trading system, its substantive law (including regional trade regimes) and the settlement of disputes. The final part of the book explores the wider framework of the world trading system, considering issues including the relationship of the WTO to civil society, the use of economic sanctions, state responsibility, and the regulation of multinational corporations.