5 - The WTO Agreement as a Law of Rights

Summary

Equality and equal treatment are the principal purpose of WTO law. However, that purpose is accomplished in varying conditions, which make it difficult to regularly attain the consistency and coherence that an egalitarian and obligatory conception of the law assumes. Consequently, this chapter proceeds to demonstrate how WTO law is focused secondarily on fairness and corrective justice and how this focus begets a subordinate emphasis in law on rights, which in turn gives rise to a contractual structure that is retrospectively oriented and reasoned inductively. It also demonstrates how various features of WTO law like the non-violation cause of action and implementation are consistent with such a rights-based ethos.