Professor John H. Jackson: The WTO and Public International Law

Abstract

In reading and re-reading just some of Professor John H. Jackson’s extensive works shedding light on the relationship between the World Trade Organization (WTO) and general international law, we have discovered his voice again. Within a few sentences, the elegance of his writing, the immediacy of his ideas, the breadth and depth of his analysis, all forcefully proclaim his significance to the field of international economic law, with no need to examine his long and impressive biography and bibliography. In those circumstances, we ourselves write with trepidation. It seems unfair to comment at all, with no opportunity for an ‘author’s response’. We first met Professor Jackson at Georgetown Law in 2003, when he had nearly half a century of groundbreaking contributions to the field behind him and we were but lowly PhD candidates having seriously turned our minds to the WTO only a few years before (under the watchful eye of Professor Joseph HH Weiler). Professor Jackson welcomed us as Visiting Scholars to the Institute of International Economic Law with an astonishing degree of warmth and personal and professional kindness, although perhaps less astonishing to anyone who knew him or to the hundreds of students and academics he mentored before and since. Our short summer visit led to continued interactions, including a six-month sabbatical at the Institute in 2009, an invitation to join the Editorial Board of the Journal of International Economic Law, and more recently the chance to join him in editing the International Economic Law Series of Oxford University Press. This kind of nurturing of our academic careers seems not at all exceptional for Professor Jackson. A quick look at the achievements of the former Editorial Assistants of this journal (Michelle Grando, Jennifer Hawkins, Nicolas Lamp, Isabelle Van Damme, to name a few) attests to both his perceptiveness in identifying promise and his ability to bring the right people together, helping them collaborate for the future and securing their addiction to international economic law. And so, to the substance of Professor Jackson’s work. A brief overview of that work is of course impossible, even within the ‘confined’ area of the relationship between the WTO and