Simon Lester

In the comments on an older post, Brett Williams points to some news about Antigua's proposed retaliation in the Gambling case: http://torrentfreak.com/antigua-government-set-to-launch-pirate-website-to-punish-united-states-130124/  He then asks: Can anyone provide any information about the outcome of

Appellate Body Member Tom Graham will be giving a talk at Hofstra on Feb. 6 entitled “It Sure Looks Different From the Inside: Deciding International Trade Disputes at the WTO”. The title sounds promising, and from what I understand he will talk a bit about the use of the Vienna

The title is:  "I just read 296 trade agreements".  (Thanks to Hosuk Lee-Makiyama for the tip!) The substance is interesting, too: ... the first question that arises is: "Why do countries sign EIAs?" … The second question is: "What are they signing?" Empirical studies extensively

Susan Aaronson has a short piece proposing some rethinking of intellectual property rights. She starts out with this: Rules governing intellectual property rights set the terms of access for users of knowledge, but the current system (which includes rigorous application of patent and copyright laws) can limit the supply of

Anders Aslund of the Peterson Institute proposes a Mutilateral Investment Agreement (MIA) (not to be confused with the failed 1990s Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI)).  I found his proposal intriguing because, as I read it, he may be making subtle suggestions about how to approach international investment issues in a

The prospect of a new WTO Director-General seems to have a lot of people thinking about the future of the WTO.  In the past few days, I've seen articles in the Guardian and Reuters, and also an FT op-ed by economist Arvind Subramanian. Subramanian thinks the

Back in July, I blogged about how many WTO disputes there had been so far in 2012.  At this pace, I said, we will see 24 complaints in 2012.  As it turns out, I was pretty close, but actually underestimated the total.  The final tally is now in: 27 complaints

From a recent Columbia FDI Perspectives paper by Catharine Titi: ... it is time to start thinking about a new balance in a move away from investment treaties’ traditional laissez-faire liberalism toward WTO law’s embedded liberalism,[2] a model whereby liberalization is embedded within a wider framework that enables

Law prof Wentong Zheng wants to replace anti-dumping and countervailing duties with a country-specific safeguard.  Here's the abstract of his paper: This article aims to restart the debate on trade remedies by offering new perspectives on the fundamental defects of the current trade remedy regime and

From the EU first written submission in Seal Products: 357. It is beyond question that the EU Seals Regime restricts trade to the extent that the General Ban provides for a prohibition, as a general rule, on the placing on the EU market of all seal products, whether domestic or