Lamp, Nicolas
(2013)
Lawmaking in the multilateral trading system.
PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Abstract
The thesis provides an analysis of multilateral trade lawmaking in the GATT and the
WTO from the late 1940s to the current Doha Round negotiations. It investigates the
discourses, practices, techniques, and legal concepts that have come to define what it
means to make trade law. These elements are essential to multilateral trade lawmaking
insofar as they provide trade negotiators with a way to frame their arguments and to go
about negotiating, and with the tools to construct trade policy disciplines and to record
them in legal form. On the other hand, they are also limiting, in that they endorse certain
ways of going about trade lawmaking as normal, and delimit what negotiators and their
audiences perceive as reasonable, legitimate, and realistic arguments in the lawmaking
process. The aim of the thesis is to destabilise these elements of trade lawmaking by
revealing their contingent and often contested origins, and by showing how they
foreclose alternative conceptions of the objectives, means, and possibilities of trade
lawmaking. While the dissertation does not provide a full-fledged normative critique of
the elements of lawmaking, it attempts to elucidate the discursive, practical, technical,
and legal underpinnings of trade lawmaking that any such reform effort will, of
necessity, confront.
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