The Appellate Body and Zeroing

Over at Opinio Juris, Roger Alford has a post criticizing the Appellate Body's findings on zeroing in the U.S. - Zeroing (DS294) case.  He also has an article on the subject, elaborating on his points in the post.  I haven't had a chance to read the full article, but I do share the skepticism he expresses in his post and the article abstract about the AB's findings in DS294 on the permissibility of zeroing (and this also applies to the recent Article 21.5 ruling in the Lumber case).  We elaborated on this a bit in the Dispute Settlement Commentary we did for the case, but it just seemed to me that the interpretation was a closer call than the Appellate Body's reasoning indicated.  In addition, there were a number of interesting policy issues, as well as some relevant negotiating history, that did not really get brought out in the AB report (but were discussed in the panel reports).