Professor John H. Jackson and the Normative Challenges of the WTO

Abstract

In November 2002, Professor John H. Jackson delivered his Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lecture at the University of Cambridge on the topic of ‘Sovereignty, the WTO, and Changing Fundamentals of International Law’. He subsequently published under that title a revised version of his lecture with Cambridge University Press. In this book, Professor Jackson explored a set of themes relating to the institutional and normative challenges of international economic law, with particular focus on the World Trade Organization (WTO). He did so at a time when, on the one hand, practitioners and academics specialized in other fields of international law were only very prudently drawing on the practice and law of the WTO and, on the other hand, some parts of the community of international trade lawyers risked settling into a ‘status quo thinking’ about the relevance of the WTO and its covered agreements to international economic law and public international law in general. Professor Jackson continued to re-examine those themes during the final years of his academic career, against the background of a much more active and informed dialogue between those different professional communities. The main thrust of his Lauterpacht Lecture was a multi-faceted inquiry into the interaction between WTO law and international law. Professor Jackson viewed that relationship as being symbiotic. I have elsewhere, in the context of the relationship between the European Union (EU) and the WTO, coined this type of relationship as being one of coadaptation, meaning that different fields of international law evolve as they interact and that, through their mutual influence, international law changes.