Simon Lester

Next week is a busy week for international economic law conferences in DC. On Wednesday, Georgetown's Institute of International Economic Law and the Graduate Institute Center for Trade and Economic Integration will host the G2 Conference on Resolving Disputes in International Economic Law. And then on Thursday, Friday,

This is from Axios: Axios has obtained a leaked draft of a Trump administration bill — ordered by the president himself — that would declare America’s abandonment of fundamental World Trade Organization rules. Why it matters: The draft legislation is stunning. The bill essentially provides Trump a license to raise U.

This is from a recently filed compaint at the U.S. Court of International Trade: Plaintiffs American Institute for International Steel, Inc. (“AIIS”), Sim-Tex LP (“Sim-Tex”), and Kurt Orban Partners, LLC (“Orban”), by and through their attorneys, hereby submit their complaint in this action seeking a declaratory judgment that section

At the last DSB meeting, the U.S. offered a detailed criticism of the Appellate Body's recent practice of taking longer than 90 days to circulate its reports. It's too long to quote the whole thing, but here is a part of it: 5. STATEMENT BY

A couple years ago, I blogged about the first appellate decision under Canada's Agreement on Internal Trade, which was on dairy products. The second decision has just been circulated, this time on beer. (The Canadian Free Trade Agreement recently replaced the AIT, so aside from any ongoing AIT

Josh Barro describes Trump's approach to negotiations as follows: Donald Trump has a negotiating tactic he really likes: Threaten to do something someone else will really hate, and then offer to stop if they give you what you want. ... One of his tactics on trade, for example, is

This is from Graham Cook: For those interested in matters of treaty interpretation and legal reasoning, here is a new paper on "The Use of Object and Purpose by Trade and Investment Adjudicators: Convergence without Interaction". It analogizes the practice of WTO and ISDS tribunals to the story

This is from the 2016 Devas v. India Award (some footnotes omitted): 219. Indeed, it is well established by judgments of the International Court of Justice (the “ICJ”) and investment arbitration awards that, unless a treaty contains specific wording granting full discretion to the State to determine what it considers

This is from Trump's press conference at the G7 yesterday: Q Mr. President, you said that this was a positive meeting, but from the outside, it seemed quite contentious. Did you get any indication from your interlocutors that they were going to make any concessions to you? And