Simon Lester

In response to my post about the German constitutional complaint against CETA, focusing on the ISDS issues, Chris Riffel sends the following thoughts: It is contested whether the envisaged establishment of the CETA Tribunal is at variance with the German constitution, notably Art. 3(1) Basic Law, because legal standing

Recently, I mentioned that Trump's advisers had raised the issue of how the use of VAT taxes in some countries but not others might distort trade, if the VAT exempts exports but is applied to imports.  I was thinking about writing something more detailed about this, but thankfully

As I've mentioned before, the Court of Justice of the EU is hearing an important case on the EU - Singapore FTA related to the competence of the EU over trade policy, which will have important implications for EU trade policy going forward. The hearing in the case was

The award in the Allard vs. Barbados investment arbitration was just recently made public.  Here were the basic facts and the legal claims: 33. In 1994, Mr. Allard decided to acquire and develop land in Barbados for an eco-tourism attraction. To this end, in October 1996, he incorporated the

This is from his farewell speech at the DSB: Most importantly, the outcome of cases must never be an acceptable reason for opposing reappointment. And similarly, an Appellate Body Member’s adjudicatory performance relating to case-management, including her “judicial style,” should not be recognized as a legitimate reason for

This is from SIEL/JIEL/OUP: " A prize has been established by the Society of International Economic Law (SIEL), Journal of International Economic Law (JIEL) and Oxford University Press (OUP) for the best essay submitted on any topic in any field of international economic law. The 2016-2017 SIEL/

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, several German NGOs have filed a complaint in German court alleging that CETA is unconstitutional. The full complaint is here. It's in German, but luckily we have a German intern named Max Wirth at Cato right now, so I asked him

The Trump campaign released an Economic Plan today. On trade, they raise one issue that has been of concern to respected trade policy people and has been lingering for quite a while: Ending the Unequal Value-Added Tax Treatment Under WTO Rules In addition to the obvious problem of relatively

This is the abstract of a new paper by Lorand Bartels: It has become conventional wisdom that once the UK leaves the EU it will have to renegotiate core aspects of its WTO rights and obligations, and in particular its concessions under Article II of the GATT 1994 and Article

After a bit of a lull, three potentially interesting new WTO complaints were filed recently. Here's a brief rundown. First up is a complaint by India focusing on various U.S. state renewable energy programs that have domestic content requirements. Are there any creative new defenses that can