The importance of the institutional dimensions to international trade law over the last decades is brought to light in this volume of previously published articles. The collection focuses on the World Trade Organization (WTO), the most important institution in international trade, and includes a selection of key contributions to the field. The approach is multi-disciplinary, encompassing mostly law, but also political science and economics, and the issues addressed are significant and diverse: the overall legitimacy and effectiveness of the WTO, the relationship between legal and judicial branches of the WTO, the path to membership in the organization, the WTO's institutional complex of councils, committees and panels, the role of the WTO secretariat, and the relationship between the WTO and regional trade frameworks. The combined strengths of the articles in the collection, which reveals a dynamic, multi-layered and complex institutional structure, make this volume of special importance to students and practitioners of international trade or international relations.

Economic development is the most important agenda in the international trading system today, as demonstrated by the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) adopted in the current multilateral trade negotiations of the World Trade Organization (the Doha Round). This book provides a relevant discussion of major international trade law issues from the perspective of development in the following areas: general issues on international trade law and economic development; and specific law and development issues in World Trade Organization, Free Trade Agreement, and regional initiatives. Although there are publications on trade and development issues, mostly discussing developing countries, few publications deal with law and development issues of international trade law comprehensively in its key areas. This book offers an unparalleled breadth of coverage on the topic and diversity of authorship, as seventeen leading scholars contribute chapters from nine major developed and developing countries, including the United States, Canada, Japan, China (including Hong Kong), South Korea, Australia, Singapore, and Israel.

How do politics and international economic law interact with each other? Financial crises and shifts in global economic patterns have refocused our attention on how the fingerprints of the visible hand can be seen all over the institutions that underpin the rules of globalization. From trade and investment to finance, governments are under pressure to enforce, resist, and re-write international economic law. Lawyers have seldom given enough attention to the influence of politics on law, whereas political scientists have had an on-again, off-again fascination with how the law influences relations among states. This book leads the way toward filling this interdisciplinary gap, through a series of important studies written by leaders in the field on specific problems in international economic relations. The book demonstrates a variety of ways in which the international political-economic nexus may be researched and understood.

Economic development is the most important agenda in the international trading system today, as demonstrated by the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) adopted in the current multilateral trade negotiations of the World Trade Organization (the Doha Round). This book provides a relevant discussion of major international trade law issues from the perspective of development in the following areas: general issues on international trade law and economic development; and specific law and development issues in World Trade Organization, Free Trade Agreement and regional initiatives. This book offers an unparalleled breadth of coverage on the topic and diversity of authorship, as seventeen leading scholars contribute chapters from nine major developed and developing countries, including the United States, Canada, Japan, China (including Hong Kong), South Korea, Australia, Singapore and Israel.

How do politics and international economic law interact with each other? Financial crises and shifts in global economic patterns have refocused our attention on how the fingerprints of the 'visible hand' can be seen all over the institutions that underpin the rules of globalization. From trade and investment to finance, governments are under pressure to enforce, resist and rewrite international economic law. Lawyers have seldom given enough attention to the influence of politics on law, whereas political scientists have had an on-again, off-again fascination with how the law influences relations among states. This book leads the way toward filling this interdisciplinary gap, through a series of important studies written by leaders in the field on specific problems in international economic relations. The book demonstrates a variety of ways in which the international political-economic nexus may be researched and understood.

Recent decades have witnessed an impressive process of normative development in international law. Numerous new treaties have been concluded, at global and regional levels, establishing far-reaching international legal and regulatory regimes in important areas such as human rights, international trade, environmental protection, criminal law, intellectual property, and more. New political and judicial institutions have been established to develop, apply and adjudicate these rules. This trend has been accompanied by the growing consolidation of treaty norms into international custom, and increased references to international law in domestic settings. As a result of these developments, international relations have now reached an unprecedented level of normative density and intensity, but they have also given rise to the phenomenon of 'fragmentation'. The debate over the fragmentation of international law has largely focused on conflicts: conflicts of norms and conflicts of authority. However, the same developments that have given rise to greater conflict and contradiction in international law, have also produced a growing amount of normative equivalence between rules in different fields of international law. New treaty rules often echo existing international customary norms. Regional arrangements reinforce undertakings that already exist at the global level; and common concerns and solutions appear in many international legal fields. This book focuses on such instances of normative parallelism, developing the concept of 'multisourced equivalent norms' in international law, with contributions by leading international law experts exploring the legal and political implications of the concept in a variety of contexts that span the full spectrum of international legal norms and institutions. By concentrating on situations governed by a multitude of similar norms, the book emphasizes the importance of legal contexts and institutional settings to international law-interpretation and application.

International law is fragmented and complex, and at the same time increasingly capable of shaping reality in areas as diverse as human rights, trade and investment, and environmental law. The increased influences of international law and its growing institutionalization and judicialization invites reconsideration of the question how should the authority to make and interpret international law be allocated among states, international organizations and tribunals, or in other words, "who should decide what" in a system that formally lacks a central authority? This is not only a juridical question, but one that lies at the very heart of the political legitimacy of international law as a system of governance, defining the relationship between those who create the law and those who are governed by it in a globalizing world. In this book, leading international legal scholars address a broad range of theoretical and practical aspects of the question of allocation of authority in international law and debate the feasibility of three alternative paradigms for international organization: Sovereignty, Supremacy and Subsidiarity. The various contributions transcend technical solutions to what is in essence a problem of international constitutional dimensions. They deal, inter alia, with the structure of the international legal system and the tenacity of sovereignty as one of its foundations, assess the role of supremacy in inter-judicial relations, and draw lessons from the experience of the European Union in applying the principle of subsidiarity. This volume will be of great interest to scholars and practitioners of international law alike.