Legal Ideas and the Transformation of Trade Law

Autor: Derek McKee
Rok vydání: 2013
Předmět:
Zdroj: Transnational Legal Theory. 4:305-311
ISSN: 2041-4013
2041-4005
DOI: 10.5235/20414005.4.2.305
Popis: After the financial collapse, after Al-Qaida and Abu Ghraib, after the Arab Spring, it is easy to forget how central the WTO once was to debates about globalisation and justice. Throughout the 1990s, organisations and movements concerned with social and environmental well-being focused many of their critiques on the WTO. This opposition culminated in the protests that filled the streets of Seattle on the eve of the millennium. Scholars and policy-makers, including many lawyers, debated whether the WTO’s mandate could be reconciled with human rights or with sustainable development. Together, these diverse actors mounted a broad challenge to the legitimacy of international trade law and its institutions. This turn-of-the-millennium legitimacy crisis provides the starting point for Andrew Lang’s inquiry in World Trade Law after Neoliberalism. However, Lang’s analysis of this crisis—and of responses to it—has a significance that extends beyond trade law: it represents an important demonstration of how legal analysis can contribute to a better understanding of contemporary global governance. Moreover, Lang’s account of changing legal theories and methods enables him to offer normative suggestions for the renewal of the trade regime. Lang situates his analysis of this legitimacy crisis within a historical account of ideational changes in and around the world trading system. Central to Lang’s historical account is the shift, beginning in the 1970s, from postwar ‘embedded liberalism’ to neoliberalism. Lang emphasises how this shift brought about an expansion of the scope of trade disciplines. The postwar GATT had mainly focused on the elimination of ‘border’ barriers, such as tariffs and quotas, or other measures with an evidently discrimina
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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