Worthy of a Nobel: An Appreciation of John H. Jackson

Abstract

If Nobel Prizes were awarded to lawyers, John Jackson would certainly have been a winner and he might have taken more than one trip to Stockholm for his landmark contributions. The first occasion would have celebrated World Trade and the Law of GATT, published in 1969, when John was a professor of law at the University of Michigan. This remarkable and even monumental treatise did several things. First, it organized in a coherent way hundreds of agreements and decisions interpreting and amending the GATT articles in the 20 years since the Protocol or Provisional Application in 1947. Second, it effectively created the law of the GATT, in the sense that legal precedents were thereafter given equal footing as political exigencies when national governments passed statutes and crafted regulations. Third, it established a framework in which small and poor countries, such as Antigua, could challenge large and rich countries, such as the USA. Fourth, World Trade and the Law of GATT gave a major boost to the discipline of international economic law, initially in US and European law schools and eventually across the globe. Fifth and finally, the treatise paved the way for GATT membership to expand—from some 40 countries at the end of the Kennedy Round in 1967, to 162 countries in the World Trade Organization (WTO) of 2015—by giving trade officials in acceding countries a comparatively quick guide to the obligations they would be undertaking. John’s second Nobel occasion might have celebrated his intellectual inspiration and unofficial diplomacy that led to the creation of the Dispute Settlement Body (DSB) in the WTO. The creation of the DSB in 1995 was itself remarkable because the USA, and to a lesser extent, the European Union (EU), harbor an historical allergy to international courts—fearing that they might circumscribe the powers of Congress or the European Parliament. John maneuvered around these obstacles by persuading the Canadian government to propose the DSB, and by convincing Europe and the USA that their international commercial rights would enjoy greater respect under the new system. Moreover, to allay US and EU concerns, John wisely shied away from such terms as ‘court’ and ‘judges’, and instead spoke of ‘dispute