As the current trade negotiating agenda struggles along, both at the multilateral and mega-regional levels, perhaps there are some government actions out there that could provide the basis for productive new negotiations.  One area that always gets me fired up is subsidies:  agriculture subsidies and export credits are big

Someone sent me Canada's third party submission in the WTO plain packaging dispute.  I checked with a friend who works for the Canadian government, and he said it was fine to post it, so here it is.  Here's an excerpt: 42. A finding of a right

From a Washington Post interview with Senator Elizabeth Warren: You can’t envision even in theory a way to structure ISDS that would assuage your concerns? WARREN: Once a group of independent arbiters, whose decisions cannot be appealed, can issue a money judgment of any size, then the ISDS problem

EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström has just announced some new ideas on ISDS, set out in this concept paper.  One of the ideas is to move investment arbitration towards being a real "international investment court."  Along the same lines, here are some ideas coming from Germany, which also

Just for fun, I've been reading the Working Party Report related to the recent Seychelles accession to the WTO (and yes, I am available to come to the Seychelles and give WTO training courses to government officials, in case they are looking for someone).  I saw three items

From the ASIL/ESIL/Max Planck: On 11-12 December 2015, the International Economic Law Interest Groups of the American and European Societies of International Law, together with the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, will hold a joint works-in-progress workshop in Heidelberg, Germany.

Law profs Sergio Puig and Greg Shaffer want to get tobacco out of the TPP: The Obama administration is poised to finalize the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. If Congress passes the current trade promotion authority bill, the TPP will become subject to a simple up or down vote, without

This is from Inside U.S. Trade: the U.S. is negotiating market access [under the TPP] on the basis of bilateral offers, meaning it could end up imposing one tariff on Malaysian dairy products, for instance, and a different tariff for New Zealand. Here's my question: Would