Foreword

Summary

The study of WTO dispute settlement has been attracting increasing interest in law and economics scholarship: in part, as a reaction to the largely impressionistic early legal literature, which had decided on the effectiveness of the new regime on scarce evidence; in part, because of the characteristics of the new regime – compulsory third party adjudication is not the paradigmatic adjudication process in international relations. There is already an impressive body of literature that addresses a series of questions relating to the participation of various WTO Members in proceedings; the impact of third parties on the outcome; the legal capacity of the various participants as an explanatory variable for success in proceedings; the propensity of complainants to prevail; the decision to litigate, and the connected decision to move from one stage of the proceedings to the next. The predictive power of the various models employed varies, and some would argue that it is probably too early to have robust empirical evidence for many of them.

The study of remedies occupies a prominent place within this body of literature. The original contributions, which saw nothing wrong with the WTO system, gave way to more skeptical views over time. There are few empirical papers and lack of transparency often makes this study difficult. Simon Schropp is on top of the literature, and this volume displays it in excellent manner. However, this is not all that the author does.