Appellate Body

The always insightful Alan Wolff was talking about The Future of the WTO at the Peterson Institute today. The whole thing is worth a listen, but I wanted to highlight his response to my question on the Appellate Body crisis during the Q & A: Adam Posen: Simon Lester asks,

One of the issues that has come up in the Appellate Body appointments crisis is what exactly the Appellate Body's role should be. You can imagine a range of options here. At one extreme, it could be an arbitrator that decides the outcome without any reasoning at all.

A trade lawyer I know wrote to me with the following comment/question for this blog's readers: I believe that any resolution of the AB crisis will be “Walker +”, i.e. the Walker Principles plus some face-saving way of addressing “substantive overreach”.  As long as we avoid linkage

In what may be the last official statement by the Trump administration on the Appellate Body, Ambassador Shea offered these comments at the December 18 DSB meeting. I have some responses to his comments. I will do this in three parts, quoting him and then responding. First up, he said

My last post was about how WTO appellate review could be made optional as a temporary solution in order to unblock Appellate Body appointments (i.e., to convince the U.S. to go along with appointing new AB Members). Here's a drafting suggestion for how to put that

This is from a recent speech by WTO DDG Alan Wolff: For dispute settlement, agreement will in the end be needed on a single mechanism to which all who seek to litigate would subscribe.  Any appellate stage must be accountable to the WTO Members as a whole. There are interim

A document from the United States that is labelled as a "notification of an appeal" in the DS533 softwood lumber case has been circulated at the WTO. In that document, the United States does not list any specific points of appeal, and says: At this time, no division

The newly-established Multiparty Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement (“MPIA”) contains an interesting provision in para 18 of its “Agreed Procedures”: “At any time during the arbitration, the appellant, or other appellant, may withdraw its appeal, or other appeal, by notifying the arbitrators. This notification shall also be notified to the panel

When the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations was completed, the world trading system was transformed in several important ways: A formal institution was created, as the World Trade Organization (WTO) replaced the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) (which had been operating as a de facto institution); the