Simon Lester

The European trade negotiators are in DC this week for the 3rd round of the TTIP talks.  A little while back, I mentioned a paper on regulatory cooperation in the TTIP.  It is now out in the JIEL.  The main point is that regulatory cooperation can work, but we should

This is from the John Birch Society: William F. Jasper, Senior Editor for The New American magazine, explains how President Obama's Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is an "an all-out assault on our national sovereignty," and how It would unconstitutionally transfer legislative powers from the U.S. Congress,

This time from the NYT editorial board: The United States is negotiating a trade agreement with 11 Pacific Rim countries right now. American officials have said they plan to include language in that pact, which could be finalized next year, to protect those nations from legal challenges by tobacco companies.

From the comments on an earlier post, here's DC trade lawyer Ted Posner: This discussion of how the United States will approve the newly concluded TFA is quite interesting. From my quick perusal of the agreement, I expect that the USG view that no congressional action is required

Rather than fighting a turf battle, they seem fine with it: The Dublin Resolution, which was issued at the conclusion of the Policy Commission meeting in Dublin, Ireland on 11 December 2013, welcomes the WTO Agreement On Trade Facilitation (the “Trade Facilitation Agreement”), as embodied in the Bali Package’s

From a NY Times article today: Tobacco companies are pushing back against a worldwide rise in antismoking laws, using a little-noticed legal strategy to delay or block regulation. The industry is warning countries that their tobacco laws violate an expanding web of trade and investment treaties, raising the prospect of

Because it's difficult for readers to follow the comments section, I wanted to elevate this question from the comments to a post: Perhaps one of the lawyers at this blog, would elucidate what seems a tricky one: The TF involves in effect amendments or changes to, among others,

This is from Todd Tucker, formerly of Global Trade Watch and now doing a PhD at Cambridge University: Right now, investment treaty arbitration is making few people happy. Investors take years to launch and litigate them, and, best case scenario, they get payment – usually far less than what they asked

Apologies for this rant, but the new format for heading numbering in WTO dispute settlement reports is getting to me.  Here's the problem, taking the EC - Seal Products panel report as an example.  Let's say you are on p. 144, and you come to this

From Tim Lee of the Washington Post: In a trio of Supreme Court decisions between 1972 and 1981, the court held that mathematical algorithms were not eligible for patent protection. Since computer software is little more than mathematical algorithms encoded in machine-readable form, most of the software industry assumed this