To follow up on Anthea's post from last week, there is another fundamental question about ISDS/investment protection: If it is going to exist, in one form or another, where exactly does it belong? Should it be part of the trade regime? Or should there be a separate

Article 1708.14 of NAFTA says: Each Party shall refuse to register trademarks that consist of or comprise immoral, deceptive or scandalous matter, or matter that may disparage or falsely suggest a connection with persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs or any Party's national symbols, or bring them

The investor-state arbitration landscape is shifting under our feet. The utility and legitimacy of traditional investor-state arbitration have come under fire, but states have not converged on a viable alternative. In simplified terms, three main camps are developing, which I call the “loyalist,” “reformist,” and “revolutionary” camps. The

In its early years, NAFTA Chapter 20 state to state dispute settlement functioned as expected.  There were complaints, a couple panels were set up, they issued reports, and compliance was sometimes achieved.  However, as I understand it (and I confess I'm fuzzy on the details), in a case

In its speech relating to the decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, President Trump emphasized that “I cannot in good conscience support a deal that punishes the United States...the world’s leader in environmental protection, while imposing no meaningful obligations on the world’s leading polluters”. While

This is from law prof Eric Posner: I’m told by someone who knows about these things that the Obama-era climate actions, combined with ongoing shifts in the U.S. energy sector, will ensure that the U.S. will reach its announced (voluntary) target under the Paris agreement, or

A couple weeks ago, I suggested that it was possible the Trump administration had already made up its mind on the Section 232 investigations, and would almost certainly find that steel and aluminum imports have impaired national security, giving the President the authority to impose trade restrictions in response (the

Last month, I blogged about a press conference by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, in which, among other things, he seemed to criticize the MFN clause as a barrier to trade liberalization. I explained (briefly) there why I thought this criticism was misguided. Chad Bown and Alan Sykes subsequently wrote a

This is from Inside US Trade: U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, at his first public appearance here during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation trade ministers meeting, said the U.S. defending its own market against unfair trade practices should not be confused with protectionism -- the definition of which, he

You may have thought the much discussed U.S. border adjustment tax proposal was dead, as not much has been said about it recently, but the Washington Post reports on a Congressional hearing yesterday: Much of corporate America is in agreement that it would like to see a sweeping overhaul