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The Creation of the Multilateral Trade Court: Design and Experiential Learning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 July 2015

MANFRED ELSIG  and
JAPPE ECKHARDT
MANFRED ELSIG*
Affiliation:
World Trade Institute, University of Bern
JAPPE ECKHARDT*
Affiliation:
Simon Fraser University
*
*Email: manfred.elsig@wti.org
**Email: jappe.eckhardt@gmail.com
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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.

Type
Review Article
Information
World Trade Review , Volume 14 , Special Issue S1: Judicial Politics in International Trade Relations , July 2015 , pp. S13 - S32
Copyright
Copyright © Manfred Elsig and Jappe Eckhardt 2015 

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