This is from law prof Luca Rubini:
We are glad to present the first events in the 2021/2022 academic year of the International Economic Law and Policy Working Group (IELPWG), set up in 2019 at Birmingham Law School.
The IELPWG is a highly-focused discussion group for those numerous scholars (staff and PhD students, as well as alumni!) in Birmingham Law School with a core expertise and interest in trade, investment, antitrust and competition, finance and monetary affairs, EU internal and external trade, and other areas which can be defined as both ‘economic’ and ‘international’. It works as an interest group with regular meetings where research is presented and topical developments discussed. While the core focus of the group is on the law, it is open to scholars coming from other disciplines (mostly economics and political science) and will also benefit from the contribution of invited speakers.
You can find details on the IELPWG, its members and forthcoming events here.
The inaugural event of the 2021/2022 academic year, scheduled for October 18, Monday (5-7pm UK time) features one of our alumni, Dr Ben Czapnik, currently post-doc at the Chinese University in Hong Kong, presenting a paper on “Moral Determinations in International Law: Lessons from the Seals Dispute”. Professor Lorand Bartels, from the University of Cambridge, will act as discussant.
You have an abstract of Ben’s paper here:While GATT Article XX(a) permits WTO Members to implement trade-restrictive measures for moral purposes, it also permits dispute tribunals to review the consistency of those measures with WTO law. In the moral disputes to date, WTO tribunals have managed a delicate balancing act by pragmatically addressing the parties' concerns while avoiding perceptions that they are second-guessing the moral choices of sovereign Members. However, this pragmatic approach has left some critical questions unanswered:
- What does the concept of "public morals" entail?
- What analytical methods are available to establish the existence of public morals?
- Are non-rationalist measures covered by the moral exception?
In this session, Dr Czapnik argues that WTO law has failed to clearly resolve these issues and that the WTO's public morals jurisprudence is ambiguous and equivocal. These issues came to the fore in the Seals dispute where there are competing academic views about the EU's underlying policy objective: was the seal products ban a rationalist animal welfare measure inspired by welfarist philosophy or did the EU offer special protection to seals because of their "cuteness" and the "moral feelings" they invoke among EU citizens?
We hope to see many of you joining this and all our events!
Luca Rubini and Henok Asmelash
