Simon Lester

This is from an article by Eric Posner and Glen Weyl: Longstanding worries that judicial review interferes with democratic values, blocks publicly beneficial legislation, and can lead to backlash, have never gained a foothold. The article as a whole is interesting, but I'm not going to talk about

This is from Inside U.S. Trade: U.S. trade officials are pressing South Korea to water down a new Korean car emissions standard or else give U.S. automakers wider leeway in complying with it, in what appears to be a second push by the Obama administration against Korean

This is a guest post from trade lawyer Adarsh Ramanujan: This blog earlier carried a post on the developments in the SCM benchmarking analysis arising from the Appellate Body decisions in US-Carbon Steel (India) (DS436), and US-CVD (China) (DS437). I consider these two reports as a watershed in

As reported last week, there is a new WTO complaint filed by the EU against U.S. aircraft subsidies: http://www.worldtradelaw.net/cr/ds487-1(cr).pdf  Here are the basics: I. Background In November 2013, the State of Washington, as part of its efforts to induce The Boeing

The recent leak of a U.S. negotiating text related to TISA has caused some concern, in part due to its potential impact on EU data protection and privacy laws. The text can be found here, and is titled "Trade in Services Agreement TISA Proposal, New Provisions Applicable to

A while back, I wondered what would happen to NAFTA Chapter 19 if the TPP comes into effect.  I can't imagine they would create a TPP equivalent.  But will it get phased out through the TPP, or will that part of the NAFTA be carried over? More significantly,

I'm always hearing about how the TTIP is finally going to address those regulatory trade barriers we have been ignoring all these years.  In general, I'm a bit skeptical: Regulatory trade barriers have been on the agenda of trade negotiations since at least the late 1920s.

Just a quick reminder from the Appellate Body, buried in a footnote in Monday's U.S. - Carbon Steel (India) report, that it still hasn't told us what it thinks of the mandatory/discretionary distinction: 1144 We note that the Appellate Body has "not, as yet,

From a blog post by Google: But sadly, as a result of a new Spanish law, we’ll shortly have to close Google News in Spain. Let me explain why. This new legislation requires every Spanish publication to charge services like Google News for showing even the smallest snippet from

Simon Evenett and Alejandro Jara have a piece at vox criticizing the "settlements" in U.S. - Cotton Subsidies and U.S. - Clove Cigarettes.  Here's an excerpt: During October 2014 two WTO disputes were settled in an extraordinary manner: In both cases the US largely lost and