Venue
Start
End
Time
Downloads
The Essential GATT/WTO – Revisiting the Fundamentals
Refresher Course
There is no registration fee for this course.
Materials Page
It is in the arena of world trade that the most important conflicts and battles, or cooperation and progress, take place and in which both overall prosperity and even pacific relations of our interdependent global society will be determined.
The GATT/WTO constitutes the essential framework, the ‘Higher Law’ or even the ‘Economic Constitution’ of our international legal order.
In this intensive albeit brief series of lessons – consisting of eight classes of one hour each – the fundamental building blocks of the international economic legal order will be highlighted. Obviously, given the concentrated nature of this exercise, the purpose of the course is not proficiency. It is designed to achieve simultaneously two goals: An overview of the system and a sharp outlining of its fundamental underlying legal principles.
Three types of audience are envisaged:
- Those for whom international trade law is a principal professional occupation. We are confident that even this group will gain insight. There are always new ways to know that which we know.
- Those whose professional legal activity is different but intersects with international trade law and may wish to have a better understanding of such intersection.
- Those who may not even be lawyers. E.g. civil servants in trade policy areas, economic operators whose business activity are impacted by the international trading system and who, too, want to understand the fundamental legal principles of the system.
Schedule of Classes:
- The economic and political Syntax and Grammar of the WTO system.
- The Most Favored Nation Discipline
- National Treatment: The Prohibition on Discriminatory Taxes
- National Treatment: The Prohibition on Discriminatory Regulation
- General Exceptions (public health, public morality, protection of the environment, etc.)
- TBT – Technical Barriers to Trade (going beyond discrimination)
- SPS – Sanitary and Phytosanitary Regulation (going beyond discrimination)
- Dispute Settlement, including GATS.
Participants who attend at least 80% of lessons will receive a Certificate of Attendance. Those wishing may sit an exam which will take place two weeks after the end of the course and, if successfully passed, will receive a Certificate issued by CIL NUS.
Dates
13, 14, July 2021
21, 22, July 2021
27, 28, July 2021
3, 4 August 2021
Time
4:00PM to 5:00PM, Singapore Time
Fee
There is no registration fee for this course.
The Instructor
J.H.H. Weiler is Professor of Law at NYU School of Law and NUS Law Faculty as well as Senior Fellow at the Harvard Center for European Studies and Co-Director of the ASEAN Law Academy at the Center for International Law, NUS.