Carveouts for tobacco control measures are spreading. The carveout was first used in the TPP, then was brought over to the Australia-Singapore FTA update. Now there is one in the Canadian Free Trade Agreement: Article 806: Tobacco Control Measures This Agreement does not apply to any measure adopted or

Over the years, I've tried on this blog to get people interested in the Canadian Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT), with little apparent success.  In part, that may have been because there just weren't enough cases (roughly 3 per year -- the list is here).  A couple

In a recent interview with the FT, President Trump had this to say about the existing U.S. trade relationship with China: How do you bring China’s trade surplus down quickly? By telling China that we cannot continue to trade if we are going to have an unfair deal

From the Faculty of Law at the University of Szeged, Hungary: Prof. Csongor István Nagy, professor of law and head of the HAS-Szeged Federal Markets “Momentum” Research Group and Dr. Zoltán Víg, associate professor of law and senior research fellow at the HAS- Szeged Federal Markets “Momentum” Research Group

On Friday, President Trump signed an executive order for an "Omnibus Report on Significant Trade Deficits."  Here's how it starts: OMNIBUS REPORT ON SIGNIFICANT TRADE DEFICITS By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America,

Following-up on my earlier post about NAFTA, now there's this from White House spokesman Sean Spicer (from Inside US Trade): Asked at the White House about a Wall Street Journal report on the draft notice, which was published Wednesday night by Inside U.S. Trade, Spicer noted

WTO scholar Chad Bown, with the Peterson Institute, has been out in front in raising the specter that some of the policies on the Trump Administration/Republican agenda, in particular the current corporate tax reform plan, could lead to immense trade retaliation under WTO rules.  I'm somewhat less

Inside US Trade has a copy of the Trump administration's draft notice to Congress "that the President intends to initiate negotiations related to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and its architecture," in which they set out "specific objectives for negotiation."  Not surprisingly,

The Yukos case is among the most flamboyant investor-state arbitrations (Chevron v. Ecuador a close competitor).  Yukos reads like a paperback thriller-settling of scores between rogue oligarchs and the Putin regime with billions at stake.  Definitely worth a mini-series on HBO or Showtime. Last night at the

BBC has the Article 50 withdrawal notification letter here.  Not surprisingly, it does not tell us much about how the withdrawal talks will go (the UK would like a "deep and special partnership" with the EU). The substance of the negotiations will become more clear as we move