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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:594133 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Lamp, Nicolas |
| Publisher | London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London) |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/796/ |
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