As everyone has probably heard at this point, yesterday the U.S. Congress approved trade agreements with Korea, Colombia and Panama.  They will now be signed into law by President Obama. I feel obligated to say something about this.  But I'm not quite sure what to say. If

1st Conference of the Postgraduate and Early Professionals/Academics of the Society of International Economic Law (PEPA/SIEL) Hamburg, 27 and 28 January 2012 Organized by SIEL in cooperation with the Institute of Law and  Economics of the University of Hamburg and Leiden University SIEL was founded in 2008 to

For those who have been following the technical regulations vs. standards debate here, let me add something else to the mix.  Here's something from a Secretariat note from early in the Tokyo Round: 4. With regard to labelling it was pointed out that in some cases labelling was

The BBC reports: Plans to include any airline landing or taking off on EU territory in an emissions trading scheme are legal, an adviser to Europe's top court has said. European Court of Justice Advocate General Juliane Kokott said this in response to a legal challenge to the

Here's the abstract of a new article from Claus Zimmerman in the Journal of World Trade, entitled 'Rethinking the Right to Initiate WTO Dispute Settlement Proceedings': This article analyses the economic merits of the factual right of governments to interpose themselves as political filters ex ante

Over the week-end, some steps were taken to bring the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) into force. I'm going to get myself in trouble here with international law folks, but let me ask this:  Is there a difference between international agreements that have an enforcement mechanism and

From the FT: The US Chamber of Commerce has claimed that the South Korea deal alone will create 280,000 jobs, while the White House has more modestly suggested a net 70,000 gain. However, the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think-tank partly funded by labour unions, has

Following up on this post, blog reader Laurens Ankersmit points me to an EU General Court order deciding that the action brought against the seal product ban under EU law was inadmissible  because the applicants did not have standing, on the basis that they were not  directly and individually concerned

There's still lots to uncover in the Tuna panel report.  Here's something on PPMs: 7.369 Finally, Mexico contends that the US measures unilaterally exert pressure on the Mexican fleet to change fishing areas and/or fishing methods, which Mexico argues is evidence of the de