This short and interactive lecture will be delivered by Professor Greg Messenger.
The legal dispute settlement mechanism of the WTO was considered the 'jewel in the crown' of the international organization for almost 30 years - 'on any view the most successful inter-state system of dispute settlement ever’ [J Crawford 2010].
Yet today, the WTO's appeal tribunal, the Appellate Body, has no members and therefore cannot hear disputes, creating a bottleneck in the system. As WTO rules become more important than ever in the face of US / China geostrategic tensions spilling into an all-out trade war and WTO members scrambling to respond to a range of issues from the climate crisis to AI, how are disputes resolved under world trade law? And what role is there for lawyers, in what appears to be a return to a power-based system focused on diplomacy rather than the rule of law?