Deborah Cass, The Constitutionalization of the World Trade Organization:

Abstract

Any occasion to reflect on Deborah Cass’s The Constitutionalization of the World Trade Organization (CWTO),1 serves immediately as a call to internationalists to revisit the moment and the context in which it was conceived. How to characterise that moment? At the time, it felt like a moment of not just substantial but of permanent, epochal change. The mid-1990s saw, in light of the birth of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the inauguration of a new system of multilateral trade relations, one that reposed an unusual degree of confidence in the possibility that legal rules, institutional forms and technocratic processes of adjudication might be used both to create a more fully integrated global market and to successfully regulate trade disputes within the international economic order. Other developments accompanying the birth of the WTO, however, were just as consequential to the new international order and, ultimately, to the context and manner in which the WTO operated, even if in ways not evident at its inception.