PROF. JOHN H. JACKSON'S COURSES AT GEORGETOWN LAW
Introductory Essay by Prof. John H. Jackson
Materials used in Prof. John H. Jackson's classes
Abridged GATT/WTO Panel and Appellate Body Reports
OTHER COURSERELATED INFORMATION
Studying International Economic Law at Georgetown Law
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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:

Syllabus for Professor Jackson's International Trade Course (including some past exams)

Syllabus for a Seminar on the WTO Dispute Settlement System
Summary of Contents () and Table of Contents () of the Casebook used by Professor Jackson and his co-authors, as well as many of his colleagues and teachers elsewhere in the world (West Publishing Company, 4th Edition, 2002)

Table of Contents of the 2002 Document Supplement () that is published along with the Casebook. NOTE: The 2002 Supplement does not contain the U.S. 2002 "Trade Promotion Authority" statute, which was enacted after publication of the Supplement.

2007 Update to Document Supplement, () prepared by William J. Davey (unpublished)

Abridged GATT/WTO Panel and Appellate Body Reports used by Professor Jackson.

 

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