Trachtman

Hearty welcome to our excellent new bloggers:  Don Regan of Michigan and Francis Snyder of LSE.

Thank you, Joel, for letting me join the discussion of Mexico – Soft Drinks.  It seems to me that if one simply picks up XX(d) and reads it as a piece of natural language, taking it all together and attending to the illustrative examples, the picture one gets is of

In a post on opinio juris, Bill Dodge writes as follows: In an article about to be published, I analyze the different approaches of NAFTA (which allows direct investor claims) and AUSFTA (which does not) and suggest a third approach. Specifically, I argue that because developed countries have developed legal

I am very pleased to welcome Lorand Bartels, of University of Edinburgh School of Law, to our group of contributors.  I look forward to his insightful contributions.

I was just reading the Leiter gossip about law professor moves (yes, I really do have better things to do), and read that Greg Shaffer has been appointed to be the first holder of the Wing Tat Lee Chair in International Law at Loyola Chicago.  Congratulations.

For those who doubt that blogging has anything to do with legal scholarship, there is now a conference planned at Harvard on the topic.

The Appellate Body has issued its (delightfully brief) report in Mexico — Tax Measures on Soft Drinks and Other Beverages” (DS308). The report will merit further study, but it appears on first glance that the Appellate Body has definitively rejected the possibility that panels or the AB would apply non-WTO

In Today's FT (free access this week), Alan Beattie reports that 13 countries have asked the U.S. to liberalize in the area of maritime transport "auxiliary services," which includes port management.  USTR Portman is reported to respond as follows: “The United States is not offering

It looks like France is finding itself on the "other" side of an SPS case.  Today's FT reports that 20 countries have determined to block poultry imports from France. Franz-Josef Feiter, secretary general of Copa-Cogeca, the European farmers’ lobby, said the bans were not

Well, I woke up early this morning, checked my e-mail and saw a notification from the WTO that the chat was about to begin.  I thought to myself "I'm late, so I will never get admitted--the limit is 500 chatters."  I suppose I got