The long-awaited Appellate Body (AB) report on the Seal dispute has just come out.  There have already been several postings on this report.  Let me focus on one particular issue: the “chapeau” test. In a nutshell, the AB integrated two strands of case law on the chapeau test (one in

Global Trade Watch: The WTO today added fuzzy white baby seals clubbed to death on bloody ice flows to dolphins and sea turtles as animals that the WTO has declared cannot be protected by domestic laws because they  violate “trade” rules, which will just fuel public and policymaker skepticism about

From the Seal Products AB report: 5.200. Finally, by suggesting that the European Union must recognize the same level of animal welfare risk in seal hunts as it does in its slaughterhouses and terrestrial wildlife hunts, Canada appears to argue that a responding Member must regulate similar public moral

From the Seal Products AB report: 5.173. Finally, we note that, in US – Shrimp, the Appellate Body stated that it would not "pass upon the question of whether there is an implied jurisdictional limitation in Article XX(g), and if so, the nature or extent of that limitation&

The Appellate Body says the Panel erred in finding that the EU seal products measure is a technical regulation: 5.58. Having reviewed the relevant aspects of the EU Seal Regime, we see only one feature that may suggest that the measure lays down product characteristics, while all others suggest

I've got a number of criticisms of Windows 8 -- why did they shuffle everything around? how do I get to desktop? -- but this is clearly going too far: China is banning Windows 8 devices from at least some government IT purchases, in a mysterious move that

From a new article on the TRIPS Agreement: Central to the controversies surrounding the TRIPS Agreement has been the ever-enigmatic determination of how far TRIPS should reach in regulating intellectual property rights. As the name of the Agreement explicitly indicates, the TRIPS Agreement is meant to regulate only those aspects

From a post at the Kluwer Arbitration Blog: The role of the tribunal secretary in international arbitration has been called an “enormously grey area” that has been subject to instances of “abuse.” With concerns of the secretary going beyond his or her position as an assistant to the tribunal and

I have a short piece in Investment Treaty News, in which I raise some issues related to how a general exceptions clause for investment like the one in the Australia-Korea FTA would work: First, there is a question as to how such an exception would apply in the investment context.