America's New Climate Unilateralism: A Better Approach to Copenhagen (original) (raw)

Trade and the Environment in the WTO

The linkage between trade and the environment stands out as an important challenge in global economic governance. Over the past decade, the WTO devoted considerable attention to this issue and included it on the agenda of the Doha Round. In parallel, the jurisprudence on trade and the environment has experienced significant advances. This study provides an overview of the main institutional changes at the WTO and of the developments in the jurisprudence most relevant to the interaction between the environment and trade. Specifically, this study focuses on GATT Article XX and takes note of many positive (and a few negative) features of the key Appellate Body decisions.

Beyond History and Boundaries: Rethinking the Past in the Present of International Economic Law

LSE Law, Society and Economy Working Papers 9/2018, 2018

History and boundaries are the foundations of international economic law (IEL) as a professional and intellectual field. History is often told to support a wide variety of present projects, norms and ideas by appealing to the past. Boundary is a technique frequently used to map and defend an exclusive domain for applying the IEL expertise to a broad range of programmes, rules and theories. This article first describes how history and boundaries interact to produce a ‘traditional’ view of IEL’s past and present place in the world economy. This interaction plays a central role in structuring how international lawyers assert the authority and legitimacy of IEL in global economic governance. It then argues that the commitments of the traditional approach to Anglocentrism and Modernism limit lawyers’ ability to understand and solve the present-day issues, since it produces lessons only in support of the dominant programmes, norms and ideas under contestation. Consequently, it constrains, instead of empowers, lawyers’ imagination. Building on this critique, the article outlines an alternative approach devised to rethink the IEL field and, more importantly, which past or new projects, norms and theories do or do not count (or should or should not count) as part of it. It concludes with reflections on how we might go about reimagining IEL in response to the contemporary challenges to global economic governance.

Ordoglobalism: The Invention of International Economic Law

Neoliberals do not believe in the liberation but in the encasement of markets. The encasement or protection is staged not only by the state but, crucially, by a law understood at the global level. This is not only the public international law between states but the private international law that protects individuals and corporations and its synthesis in the so-called International Economic Law (IEL) ascendant since the 1980s. Neoliberals, especially those from what I call the Geneva School as opposed to the Chicago School, share a foundational belief in the need for what they call the visible hand of the law as the necessary supplement to the invisible hand of the market. This essay introduces the idea of ordoglobalism as a way of describing this inherently political school of thought.

Rebuilding Global Trade: Proposals for a Fairer, More Sustainable Future

In advance of the G20 London Summit in early April 2009, and in the context of the economic crisis, the immediate priority of many governments and trade experts was rightly to create and implement a strategy that would offset declining trade and investment, particularly in developing countries where the crisis threatens to impede economic growth and development progress made in recent years. In an effort to address these pressing issues and provide suggestions for G20 leaders' deliberations, this collection assembled short essays from a broad range of scholars and experts around the world. Contributing authors were asked to consider, among other points, concrete proposals for trade-related actions that G20 leaders should undertake; challenges facing the multilateral trading system in the long term; and an examination of the reality and needs of developing countries in the context of the crisis.