The World Trade Organization

Mitsuo Matsushita is a professor emeritus of Tokyo University and a counsel to Nagashima, Ohno & Tsunematsu, a leading international law firm in Tokyo. Having earned a Ph.D. degree from Tulane University in 1962 and a D.Jur. degree from Tokyo University in 1968, he went on to be internationally acknowledged as a Japanese expert in the field of competition law and international economic law. In his academic career, he has held professorships in Japan at Sophia University, Tokyo University and Seikei University. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, Michigan Law School, Columbia Law School, the Monash University in Australia and at the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium. He has written many books and articles on various aspects of international trade and competition and investment law. In his public career, he served as one of the founding members of the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization from 1995 to 2000.

Thomas J. Schoenbaum serves as a Professor of International Studies at the International Christian University in Japan. He has taught at the law schools of the University of North Carolina, Tulane University, and the University of Georgia. At Tulane he served as associate dean and at Georgia he was executive director of the Dean Rusk Center of International and Comparative Law. He has practiced law extensively as special counsel for several law firms and has litigated corporate, environmental, and admiralty cases in the federal courts. Professor Schoenbaum has received six Fulbright awards and has held teaching posts in many countries, including Germany, Belgium, the UK, South Africa, Austria, Russia, and Japan. He has served as visiting fellow at St. John's College, Oxford and as principal fellow of the Lauterpacht Research Centre of International Law at Cambridge. Professor Schoenbaum specializes in international commercial and environmental law. He is the author of many articles and books.

Petros C. Mavroidis is professor of European Union and World Trade Organization (WTO) Law at the University of Neuchâtel and at Columbia Law School, New York. He was previosuly Chair for Competition Law at European University Institute, Florence and member of the Legal Affairs Division at the WTO. He is chief co-rapporteur at the American Law Institute (ALI) for the project "Principles Of International Trade Law: The WTO" and rapporteur for the ILA (International Trade Law Committee).

Michael Hahn is Managing Director of the Institute for European & International Economic Law and a Director of the World Trade Institute, both at the University of Bern. Previously, he held the chair of European law at the University of Lausanne and was a Professor of Law at the University of Waikato, Hamilton and is Visiting and Honorary Professor. He has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Bonn, Fukuoka, Macerata, Paris, Zurich, at the Chicago-Kent-College of Law, the Europainstitut Saarbrücken, Murdoch University Perth, PUCP Lima, the Universidad de Chile, the University of the Witwatersrand and UNSW. He was the Marcel-Storme-Visiting Professor at the University of Ghent, teaches and publishes in English, French and German and advises sovereign and private clients in international economic, EU internal market and foreign relations law. Trained in Germany, he holds a PhD from the University of Heidelberg and a masterâs from the University of Michigan Law School.

The WTO is one of the most important intergovernmental organizations in the world, yet the way in which it functions as an organization and the scope of its authority and power are still poorly understood. This comprehensively revised new edition of the acclaimed work by an outstanding team of WTO law specialists provides a complete overview of the law and practice of the WTO.
The authors begin with the institutional law of the WTO (such as the sources of law and remedies of the dispute settlement system), then tackle the principal substantive obligations of the WTO regime (including tariffs, quotas, and MFN). They then move on to consider unfair trade, regional trading arrangements, and developing countries. In its final section the book deals with the consequences of globalization: firstly, where free trade is seen to be incompatible with environmental protection
and, secondly, where WTO law confronts legal regimes governing issues of competition and intellectual property.

This is the third edition of a highly acclaimed work on the WTO, providing a complete overview of its law and practice. It traces the origins and development, via the GATT, of all of the substantive legal areas covered by the WTO, as well as its sources of law, dispute settlement system, enforcement mechanisms, and its impact on other areas of law.

One of the pivotal works on the WTO, indispensable for