Blogs serve many functions – including the dissemination of information, analysis of recent panel and AB decisions, and scholarly exchange. Many blogs also highlight notable recent and forthcoming scholarship. Assuming that IELP readers are interested in current scholarship but may not always have time to review the current literature, from time to time it might be useful to flag particularly interesting or important articles.
The current Journal of International Economic Law contains several interesting articles, including Bill Davey’s overview of the current state of play of the Doha negotiations; Joost Pauwelyn’s effort to untangle the complex interplay of US-Mexico disputes over softwood lumber and sweeteners; doctrinal analyses of the Gambling dispute and the Cotton decision; an examination of whether WTO authorized trade retaliation really serves to rebalance concessions, and Kara Leitner and Simon Lester’s annual statistical analysis of WTO dispute settlement.
All of these papers are well worth reading, but perhaps the most challenging article in the issue is Andrew Lang’s paper, entitled Reconstructing Embedded Liberalism: John Gerard Ruggie and Constructivist Approaches to the Study of the International Trade Regime. Although several IELP bloggers, including me, have discussed Ruggie’s theory of embedded liberalism, Lang argues that we have largely missed the point. In particular, Lang argues that "while the narrative of embedded liberalism itself has been relatively well reproduced," legal scholars have neglected the constructivist framework upon which Ruggie’s argument is based. Lang tries to demonstrate the ways in which constructivist approaches can enhance our understanding of how the trade regime evolves, as well as of our understanding of the consequences of the trade regime – its effects on behavior and outcomes. In short, the paper argues that our preoccupation with conventional materialist and interest-based analyses should be supplemented by attention to the role of ideational factors in constituting the trade regime.
Lang presents a powerful and challenging argument. Assuming many ILEP readers will be attending the upcoming WTO conference at Columbia later this week, it might be fun to read Lang’s article on the flight to the conference, and, afterwards, reflect on how the presentations/discussions at the conference might have differed if they had taken the constructivist challenge seriously.