Foreword

Summary

This is the seventh volume analyzing legal decisions of the World Trade Organization for publication by The American Law Institute (ALI) and the Cambridge University Press. The WTO decisions, most of them from the Appellate Body, demonstrate a gradual process of creating trade law doctrine that applies one of the world's most important treaties to significant economic disputes. We believe that the contributions made by economists and lawyers in describing and criticizing the WTO's outcomes and the reasoning that supports them are a step toward the establishment of a body of international law that is now, and will increasingly be, essential to a world economy based on huge cross-border trade. Our books have now analyzed all the important WTO decisions issued in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

The ALI is also at work on books that propose governing principles for trade law. In 2008, we published The Genesis of the GATT, by Professors Douglas A. Irwin, Petros C. Mavroidis, and Alan O. Sykes. In the next year, we expect to publish a comprehensive analysis of the principle of nondiscrimination in international trade, with particular attention to the economics of trade agreements. The volume will discuss nondiscrimination with regard to both border instruments (GATT Article I) and domestic instruments (GATT Article III (national treatment)).