Annual WTO Conference

In 2001 the Institute organised, in conjunction with the Institute of International Economic Law at Georgetown University Law Center, the first of its Annual WTO Conferences, chaired by then Advocate General Francis Jacobs and Professor John Jackson, the nestor of international trade law.

By now these annual conferences are firmly established as the most important annual event for international scholarship and policy discussion. Judges, officials, policy-makers of different sorts have met with the established scholars and recent recruits to the discipline, and participation in the Institute's Annual WTO Conference has provided all a venue where to confront experiences and reflections about the functioning of the WTO and its dispute settlement system.

Topics covered have included the jurisprudential and procedural features of the dispute settlement system, institutional issues such as the allocation of powers between different organs within the WTO as well as between the organization and its members, the relationship between the WTO legal system and international law, compliance issues, the interrelation between trade liberalization and other non-trade concerns such as environmental protection and labour standards. For more information on the past and future Annual WTO Conferences click on the following links:

Overview in JIEL

Extensive overviews of the Fifth and Sixth Annual WTO Conferences have been prepared by Isabelle Van Damme, Cambridge University, and published in the Journal of International and Economic Law (JIEL) by Oxford University Press: Fifth (8 JIEL 3, 2005, 769-792) and Sixth (9 JIEL 3, 2006, 749-767).

Publication

In order to preserve the rich and insightful ideas that have been shared by conference participants, the Institute makes an effort to collect the papers submitted and presented as well as the ensuing discussion held in the course of these conferences. In 2005, the Institute published WTO Law and Process, collecting presentations and papers from the 2002-2004 WTO Conferences. In 2007, the Institute published WTO Law and Process: Proceedings of the 2005 and 2006 WTO Conferences.