Joseph Conti- “We’ve Won, Now What?” Compliance Measures and Their Uses at the World Trade Organization
ABF Doctoral Fellow
In this talk, I examine the compliance measures of the World Trade Organization’s dispute settlement system. It has been well-established that the compliance measures of the WTO are weak and favor rich countries. Nonetheless, the legalization of the disputing process has been generative of expectations that the WTO’s legal architecture would offer enhanced enforcement of panel and Appellate Body determinations. This expectation exists alongside a much older norm, which held that WTO legalities constituted a structured negotiation forum for rebalancing trade concessions. Drawing on insights from well-placed actors in the WTO system, I argue that the co-existence of divergent normative understandings about the goals of WTO law 1) is linked to the ad hoc and intermittent introduction of legal ideas and practices into the GATT/WTO system, 2) mirrors the tension between lawyers and diplomats and the quasi-juridical features of the system, and 3) decouples expectations about winning legal rulings from expectations of substantive compliance. The decoupling of expectations in turn not only shapes the motives for dispute initiation, but raises questions about the efficacy of law in international contexts and the character of international society more generally.
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