The project

This is the second in the series of Reporters' Studies emanating from the American Law Institute (ALI) project Principles of Trade Law: The World Trade Organization (WTO). The aim of the project is to provide systematic analysis of WTO law based in both Economics and Law. Such an interdisciplinary approach is in our view necessitated by the fact that the WTO Agreement has inherently economic objectives, which is not to deny that it may have other objectives as well.

A fundamental methodological problem facing the project is the lack of a “manual” for how to perform a joint economic and legal analysis of the WTO contract; there is no field, “The Economics of Trade Law,” that can be relied upon for the purpose of the project. The relevant specialized fields, such as International Trade Law and International Economics, instead differ widely, both in terms of aims and in terms of method, and lawyers and economists are typically too specialized in their respective fields to be able to undertake a legal-cum-economic analysis of the law by themselves. Instead, such an analysis requires the joint efforts of economists and lawyers. The main idea behind this project is to develop such collaboration.

The project undertakes yearly analysis of the case law from the adjudicating bodies of the WTO. The intention is each year to analyze all disputes that in the previous year came to an administrative end, either because they were not appealed or because they went through both the panel and the Appellate Body (AB) stages, even though time constraints may prevent us from covering each and every dispute that falls into this category.