Over at Opinio Juris, Roger Alford has an interesting post on the precautionary principle.  Among other things, he notes: Of course, there are mild and strong versions of the precautionary principle. As Cass Sunstein has noted in this article, a mild version rather benignly posits that "a lack of

I suppose that the irony of the U.S. and Russia reaching agreement in Hanoi, of all places, on a bilateral agreement to move forward with Russia's accession, was lost on no one.  Does this move have geopolitical significance?  Putin thinks so:  "This creates a favourable background

Advocacy and rhetoric aside, Oxfam's report on the implementation of the "Paragraph 6 Public Health" TRIPS amendment on patent protection is pretty damning. Much of the objection is against TRIPS-plus and political pressure preventing states with generic medicine production capacity from exercising rights under the December

In an earlier post, I quoted the Economist taking the view that the new Democratic Congress would be more skeptical on trade issues.  Now someone has tried to quantify this point.  Simon Evenett and Michael Meier of the Swiss Institute for International Economics and Applied Economic Research at the University

A few weeks ago, I did a post relating to a summary of the recent Hormones panel meetings, by Anna-Emilia Autio and Petko Kantchevski: * Wednesday, September 27, 2006, meeting of Panel with parties and scientific experts (notes of Petko Kantchevski) * Thursday, September 28, 2006, meeting of Panel with parties and

The report of Senator Lautenberg mentioned by Simon Lester in a recent post, does not say a word about two important legal points in the context of this issue (See "OPEC, the WTO, Regionalism, and Unilateralism”, Journal of World Trade, Vol. 37 (2003), by Melaku Desta). 1. Four important

Pascal Lamy was in the U.S. last week, and spoke in a number of academic and other settings.  (He also completed the NY Marathon on Sunday--practice for the Doha Round, perhaps.)  See the story and pictures about his visit to Fletcher.  Lamy spoke quite a bit about governance, and

I've heard it suggested that OPEC's actions to limit oil supply violate WTO rules.  See, for example, this recent press release and report from Senator Frank Lautenberg.  After running through the legal arguments, the report concludes: OPEC’s practices are in violation of WTO rules prohibiting