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Prof. John H. Jackson's Georgetown Law Course
& Seminar
Professor Jackson receives many requests for help in planning
a course on international trade law or the WTO, so he agreed
to post material here for downloading and printing by any
teacher who wishes information about his course. Included
is a brief introductory essay about the philosophy of the
course. These materials are not to be duplicated for purposes
other than that expressed in this web site. It is the hope
of the Institute that these materials will be useful to
law teachers, and possibly other teachers, at various levels
of education.
Generally, it is quite difficult to develop a course in
international economic law. This is partly because the material
is changing so rapidly, but also because of the level of
detail which has to be understood and organized in a way
so as to allow students, with the limited time and resources
they possess, to efficiently learn the material. For example,
a core part of courses of this type now consists of reports
of the WTO dispute settlement system. However, these reports
are very voluminous and therefore it is important to have
abridged versions of these cases available. Professor Jackson
uses such abridged versions, and posts them here for teachers
to use also. He wishes to express the caveat that editing
and abridging a case never suits every teacher or scholar,
since a number of the decisions of what to include and exclude
are either somewhat arbitrary, or are related to specific
overall goals of the course involved, but sometimes the
goal is not so articulated.
Introductory
Essay by Prof. John H. Jackson: Study Plan for International
Trade Law & WTO Courses
A few words about the philosophical
underpinnings of my course might be useful. First, there
are many courses and different approaches to the subject
of international trade or international economic law, but
roughly, they divide into two general types: 1) a course
that emphasizes transactions, and is often titled "International
Business Transactions;" and 2) a course that emphasizes
regulation and the legal interplay between different levels
of government on the economic activities that cross borders.
It is the second approach that is the focus of the materials
below, and is the preference of Professor Jackson in his
teaching. The basic purpose of the course therefore, is
to provide students, scholars, and teachers with a fundamental
understanding of the "world trading system." Thus,
a considerable amount of attention is given to the institutional
structure of that system as it operates both at national
government levels and international government and regulatory
levels. Some courses on this subject, or particularly on
international business transactions, tend to be what Professor
Jackson terms "smorgesboard courses," in the sense
of presenting small segments of a large number of different
subjects. By contrast, the course that Professor Jackson,
his co-authors, and colleagues give, tries to look at the
world trade system as an integrated "constitutional"
activity, and to probe that system in some depth. This necessarily
requires the scope to be somewhat limited. The objective
is to provide students with an in depth understanding of
the system which makes them better able on their own to
later accomplish expertise on particular aspects of the
system.
In order to accomplish the objectives indicated above,
the course is basically divided into four parts. The first
part emphasizes the national and international level institutional
structure. Thus, the course deals a bit with national government
constitutional and other governmental structures and systems
that relate to international trade. Since the United States
and the European Union are the two largest trading entities
in the world, there is naturally focus on those two systems,
while giving some rather brief background on a number of
other country systems. Of course there is no way to look
systematically at the 140 or more countries that participate
in the system. In this part of the course, there is emphasis
on how nations make trade treaties, how the carry out trade
treaties, and how they regulate at the national level trade
transactions of a variety of different types.
Part II of the course then turns to the five general categories
of trade regulation and their policies. This is done with
reference both to national government regulation and to
international regulation (WTO), but mostly to the latter.
These five general areas are: 1) border measures (such as
tariffs and quotas); 2) the most favored nation clause (meaning
non-discrimination as among nations, abbreviated MFN); 3)
the national treatment clause (meaning non-discrimination
as between imported and domestically produced goods or services);
4) safeguard measures (such as the escape clause, or voluntary
restraint arrangements, etc.); and finally 5) unfair trade
measures (which itself is sub-divided into dumping and anti-dumping
duties, subsidies & countervailing duties, the injury
test for those two subjects, and several other unfair type
subjects as well retaliatory measures that are used in that
context-US section 301, or the European Union trade barriers
regulation). These are the core trade regulation and policy
issues that are essential to the understanding of the trade
regulation system overall.
Part III of an outline then deals with some of the newer
subjects and some of the possible future subjects. The newer
subjects currently in the system include trade in services
and intellectual property. Other subjects that are proposed
to be included in the system (but which are very controversial)
include competition policy, investment regulatory measures,
links to environmental policy, labor standards connections,
etc. Usually in my three credit course (about 40 hours),
I find that it is not possible to do very much in Part III
of the outline, particularly if the course is designed to
give a reasonably thorough understanding of the material
set out in parts one and two.
Part IV of the outline then simply addresses some concluding
and perspective materials, usually on a "read only"
basis (with perhaps one final class session used to develop
discussion). The idea here is to put forward materials and
provocative thoughts to encourage the students to step back
from the detail previously dealt with in the course, and
think broadly of the total landscape of the globalized world
that we live in, and how that relates to the subject matter
of this course. For example, the relations between the dispute
settlement processes and the rest of the trading system
pose some fundamental jurisprudential questions. Different
teachers will generally assign different chapters in this
part of the course.
Below there is a note about the dispute settlement cases
of the WTO, particularly the DS cases of the new WTO system
in place since 1995. There is a substantial body of jurisprudence
now that have been approved by the Dispute Settlement Body
and this amount of material, which consists of thousands
of pages of reports is a bit overwhelming already, although
it is a very interesting and very rich jurisprudence. For
a teacher, however, it presents a dilemma as to how to present
this material. Thus, in the paragraph below, we list those
cases which we think are the most significant in relation
to the basic goals of this course which are to focus on
the fundamental "constitutional" structure of
the trading system. With that listing, we give a short paragraph
description of the case. Then, we indicate the number of
pages of the full text of the case report, and the number
of pages (much shorter) of an abridged version of the cases
that Professor Jackson has used in his courses. In another
segment of this web site, we provide these abridged texts.
Teachers can download them, so as to reproduce them directly
for student use, or to include them in a web site related
to their course for students to view. We should stress that
the abridging is rather severe, and also can be somewhat
controversial, so some teachers will certainly want to use
different parts of the cases. Clearly, it is possible also
for teachers to download these abridgements and further
edit them to compress the material further than we have
provided here. All of the cases can be found in full text
at the WTO web site at: www.wto.org. Likewise, some teachers
will prefer to select some cases not on our list, particularly
as new cases are reported.
We also recommend teachers to examine the rather lengthy
WTO document called the "Overview of the State-of-Play
of WTO Disputes" describing all of the cases which
have been brought, the status of each of them, as well as
the degree of implementation or compliance that has occurred.
This document can be found at: http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/dispu_e.htm#update.
In addition, we supply in another segment of this web site,
a relatively brief bibliography
of some of the major works on the international trade system
which teachers may want to either assign to students, or
direct their attention to those works, for additional reading.
Finally, we should note the many research resources of this
web site and of its sister web site which has been developed
specifically for assisting research on international economic
law by the international law department of the Georgetown
University Law Center Library (http://www.ll.georgetown.edu/intl/iiel/home.htm)
The Materials for this Course Include
the Following:
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