Recently, I had been wondering about "survival" clauses in investment treaties. These are provisions that allow for investment claims to be brought even after the treaty has been terminated. Here's an example from the US Model BIT, in Article 22, paragraph 3: For ten years from

From the European Commission: The European Union will continue to offer enhanced access to the EU market for vulnerable developing countries as of 1 January 2014: Armenia, Bolivia, Cape Verde, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Georgia, Mongolia, Paraguay, Pakistan and Peru. Pakistan will enter the scheme for the first time. The so-called

A while back, I suggested that consumers don't want to see the word "slaughtered" on their packages of meat.  If that's true, it might affect the way we evaluate the COOL requirement to include information on where meat was "born, raised and slaughtered&

We are going to host two trade and IP events at Cato in January.  I'll remind everyone again after the holidays, but this is just to put it on your radar now. The first one is on the Eli Lilly NAFTA Chapter 11 case, and will be on

My Cato colleague Bill Watson says no: Many will argue that you need fast track to pass free trade agreements, but right now trade promotion authority is largely useless and unacceptably costly. Recent history with fast track shows that the obstacles to passing free trade agreements depend more on the

See the new VoxEU ebook on the future of the WTO after Bali, with a number of interesting contributions, organized by Alejandro Jara and Simon Evenett:  Building on Bali.  My own contribution discusses the possibility of addressing regulatory barriers to trade through an enhanced multilateral mechanism for recognition.

The European trade negotiators are in DC this week for the 3rd round of the TTIP talks.  A little while back, I mentioned a paper on regulatory cooperation in the TTIP.  It is now out in the JIEL.  The main point is that regulatory cooperation can work, but we should

This is from the John Birch Society: William F. Jasper, Senior Editor for The New American magazine, explains how President Obama's Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is an "an all-out assault on our national sovereignty," and how It would unconstitutionally transfer legislative powers from the U.S. Congress,

This time from the NYT editorial board: The United States is negotiating a trade agreement with 11 Pacific Rim countries right now. American officials have said they plan to include language in that pact, which could be finalized next year, to protect those nations from legal challenges by tobacco companies.

From the comments on an earlier post, here's DC trade lawyer Ted Posner: This discussion of how the United States will approve the newly concluded TFA is quite interesting. From my quick perusal of the agreement, I expect that the USG view that no congressional action is required