Thanks to the  efforts of leading WTO scholars and EUI professors Bernard Hoekman and Petros Mavroidis, today we have a better view of the perspectives and positions of seven of the nine candidates for Director-General of the WTO.  Their e-book Race for the WTP Director General job:  Seven candidates speak,

The General Assembly has approved the conventional weapons trade treaty.  While the treaty requires members to restrict exports in certain circumstances, it contains no reference to WTO law requirements, and Art. 26 on the relationship with other agreements seems to assert dominance. See Joost Pauwelyn's earlier post on

One of the big issues in the US-EU trade talks is supposedly going to be "regulatory trade barriers."  Everyone agrees there are significant economic gains to be had by eliminating these barriers.  And I can imagine there are.  But one problem is, it is not really clear what

The Washington Post reports on a big patent decision at the Indian Supreme Court: India’s Supreme Court on Monday rejected a Swiss pharmaceutical company’s effort to patent an updated version of its cancer drug, a decision aimed at boosting a domestic generic drug manufacturing industry that supplies cheap

Over at Opinio Juris, Roger Alford talks about some new U.S. cybersecurity legislation that bars federal government purchases of IT equipment “produced, manufactured or assembled” by entities “owned, directed, or subsidized by the People’s Republic of China” unless the head of the purchasing agency consults with the FBI

There has been a lot of excitement in the area of trade in cigarettes in recent years.  We've had the Clove Cigarettes case.  The Australian Plain Packaging case is starting up, and might spread if others adopt plain packaging.  Trade concerns have been raised about Canadian rules on

Following-up on Perry's excellent post about the Supreme Court decision in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., I just wanted to offer some brief thoughts.  A couple months ago, I saw this post from economics blogger Tyler Cowen, titled "What does equilibrium look like for the

This is a guest post by Perry S. Bechky, Visiting Scholar at Seattle University School of Law and Senior Attorney at Dorsey & Whitney LLP. If you buy a book (or other copyrighted work), where does your right to resell it end?  Does the answer depend on whether the resale

At the latest TBT Committee meeting, Malawi has offered a very interesting communication (G/TBT/W/360) related to the EU's proposed Tobacco Products Directive.  In short, they think it violates various TBT Agreement provisions.  They raise several aspects of the measure in particular: * the ingredients bans: There

James Flett of the European Commission has an interesting article in the latest JIEL issue, entitled "WTO Space for National Regulation: Requiem for a Diagonal Vector Test."  His focus is on de facto violations of the national treatment obligation. When I first saw the article, I thought about