From Peggy McGuinness: International Law Weekend 2007 Towards a New Vision of International Law Call for Panel Proposals The post-9/11 era has been one of great contestation for international law.  Scholars and practitioners debate basic questions about the content and nature of public international law and how the political

Well, I spent the afternoon at a conference at Harvard today, where Jagdish Bhagwati was to debate Alan Blinder about Offshoring/Outsourcing. Actually, their biggest disagreement was about the name of the phenomenon. Blinder uses offshoring to refer to country effects, as opposed to firm effects, whereas Bhagwati just uses

Dani Rodrik has entered the blogosphere.  In one of his first posts, he questions whether free trade leads to lower prices.  At the risk of getting into issues that I don't know as much about as I wish I did, I'm going to offer a criticism

According to a recent announcement from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and WorldPublicOpinion.org, publics think globalization is helpful, but worry about the effects on labor and the environment: Majorities around the world believe economic globalization and international trade benefit national economies, companies, and consumers.  But many think trade

There's little question that the 2008 U.S. Presidential election will have a significant impact on future U.S. trade policy and bilateral/multilateral trade negotiations in general.  Here's what the three leading Democratic candidates (listed alphabetically, to avoid any suggestion of favoritism) have had to

Chantal Thomas of Minnesota and I are organizing a conference on Developing Countries in the WTO Legal System.  The conference is inspired by Bob Hudec's 1987 book, and the manuscript updated edition that I have been working on.  For conference information see the site:  http://www.law.umn.

A NY Times article reports that U.S. farm subsidies are mainly for corn, soybeans, wheat, rice and cotton, and says that "U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy."  The result,

Eric Posner has an op ed in yesterday's WSJ, saying that human rights don't do any good, and suggesting that the whole project be abandoned.  While there is lots to argue with, I wanted to note one point here. Posner suggests that the advancement of well-being

"China sets fire to pirated goods in latest crackdown". Censorship is usually thought of as conflicting with trade rules. Here we see a trade rule (IP protection) that potentially goes hand in hand with censorship. An incendiary combination. This supports my speculation about the legal link between the