A Field of his Own: John Jackson and the Consolidation of International Economic Law as a Scholarly Domain

Abstract

‘When I first became interested in GATT matters some years ago, I was struck by the intricate complexity of the law of that institution and the paucity of literature available to assist a person to learn about it. I needed a treatise that would have assisted me and I soon found that others shared my need. This work is a response to that need.’ In this characteristically understated manner, John Jackson prefaced his magisterial, seminal 1969 book, ‘World Trade and the Law of GATT’, which served for many years as the main and most comprehensive source for students and scholars of the GATT (and indeed, nearly half a century later, it still makes for fascinating and useful reading, not merely for the sake of historical curiosity). Between these lines, one sees Jackson’s academic vision as it was borne out through his rich career and his prolific scholarship: international economic law (then, as now), an opaque area dominated by expert practitioners and object-oriented diplomats, is nevertheless also a distinct area of legal study, an academic discipline in its own right, worthy of its own teachings, its own unifying theories and spirited debates, its own rigorous research and its own scholarly community. It is a testament to John’s success as an academic trailblazer in the pursuit of this major endeavor—along with several others, in particular the late Robert Hudec— that those who become interested in international trade law today will find international economic law courses as standard offerings in the curricula of major law schools all around the world, and indeed risk being overwhelmed by the abundance, rather than the paucity, of scholarly output in the field. Speaking for myself, well before I ever imagined that I would one day come to consider John Jackson as a senior colleague, the first book I ever read on international trade law was one of his