The Georgetown International Trade Update is this week: http://www.law.georgetown.edu/continuing-legal-education/programs/cle/international-trade-update/agenda/index.cfm As usual, there's a lot on the agenda, but this one intrigues me the most: Luncheon Address: A Conversation with Jan Woznowski on Trade Law, WTO Litigation, and

From Politico: First lady Michelle Obama will unveil a proposal Tuesday that would ban marketing junk food and sodas in schools — an unusually aggressive position for the administration that could draw the ire of school districts, food companies and conservatives. Schools would no longer be able to house vending machines

Regulatory cooperation is a hot topic these days, one that I've mentioned a few times on this blog.  Next week at NYU they will be talking more about it: NYU's Global Administrative Law Project will be hosting a symposium at the end of next week, Feb

From a new paper by Thomas Schultz and Cedric Dupont: We consider three main hypotheses about the functional effects of investment arbitration. They form three models or candidate-theories of the functions that investment arbitration may empirically have: (1) investment arbitration serves to champion and strengthen the interests of economic powers

From the FT: The US has proposed that EU regulators be required to publish the proposed texts of regulations and open them to public comment. It also wants regulators to be required to consider comments and explain why they had adopted – or failed to adopt – outside suggestions when they finalise

U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman recently gave a speech at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. One of his goals seemed to be to convince people on the left of the political spectrum that trade is not something to be feared. In doing so, he focused

From Transnational Dispute Management: The formidable scale and pace of economic and legal development in the Pacific Rim region offers considerable opportunities, but also carries certain risks. The forthcoming Pacific Rim TDM Special Issue will collect views of experienced practitioners, academics, and policymakers on key economic and legal opportunities and

A while back I asked: if NAFTA gets subsumed in the TPP, would that satisfy Obama's campaign pledge to renegotiate NAFTA? It appears that maybe U.S. Trade Rep. Froman is thinking along the same lines: “As a candidate for President, then-Senator Obama said he would renegotiate NAFTA,

It's always nice when I run across a piece of scholarship that appears to confirm my instincts (in this case, that U.S. and EU regulation are not really all that different): The regulation of health and environmental risks has generated transatlantic controversy concerning precaution and the precautionary

One of the criticisms of the TPP from some U.S. groups is that its rules on the environment might not be strict or enforceable enough.  (See, e.g., this NY Times article). But not everyone thinks trade agreements should take on this task.  Here's an example from