Elsig, Manfred and Eckhardt, Jappe orcid.org/0000-0002-8823-0905 (2015) The Creation of the Multilateral Trade Court:Design and Experiential Learning. World Trade Review. S13-S32.
Abstract
The creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO)'s dispute settlement system (DSS) in 1995 remains one of the most puzzling outcomes in international politics and international law in the 1990s. We provide a new explanation for this move to law. We argue that important contextual variables of the negotiations have been largely overlooked by existing explanations, namely ‘experiential learning’. While negotiations to create institutions are characterized by uncertainty about distributional effects, negotiators will look for clues that moderate uncertainty. In the context of the Uruguay Round negotiations, a significant amount of information was drawn from actual practice and experience with the existing General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) dispute settlement system. In short, experience gained with judicial institutions and outcomes is important to understand the key results of the negotiations: a legalization leap, more specifically a judicialization of the existing dispute settlement system. We focus on the two dominant actors in the negotiations (the United States and the (then) European Community) and provide evidence for our argument based on an analysis of GATT cases in the 1980s, GATT documents, and in-depth interviews with negotiators who participated in the negotiations.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © Manfred Elsig and Jappe Eckhardt 2015. This is an author-produced version of the published paper. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy. Further copying may not be permitted; contact the publisher for details |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of York |
Academic Units: | The University of York > Faculty of Social Sciences (York) > Politics (York) |
Depositing User: | Pure (York) |
Date Deposited: | 24 Nov 2016 10:10 |
Last Modified: | 21 Jan 2025 17:19 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1017/S1474745615000130 |
Status: | Published |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1017/S1474745615000130 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:107493 |