John H. Jackson Moot Court Competition 2026

International trade law emerged from the post-World War II effort to prevent the beggar-thy-neighbor protectionism of the 1930s, which many economists and statesmen blamed for deepening the Great Depression and fueling geopolitical conflict. The 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) established core disciplines—most-favored-nation treatment, national treatment, tariff bindings, and prohibitions on quantitative restrictions—and supported eight successive negotiating rounds that progressively lowered tariffs and expanded the scope of trade rules. Alongside GATT, regional and bilateral instruments proliferated, ranging from the European Economic Community in 1957 to NAFTA in 1994, building a layered system of multilateral, plurilateral, and preferential commitments. The 1995 establishment of the World Trade Organization marked a qualitative shift: a single undertaking covering goods, services (GATS), and intellectual property (TRIPS), backed by a compulsory Dispute Settlement Understanding with binding panel and Appellate Body review. Subsequent decades saw the accession of major economies including China (2001) and Russia (2012), the stalling of the Doha Development Round after 2008, and the rise of mega-regional negotiations such as the CPTPP and RCEP. Investment treaties, export controls, and sanctions regimes increasingly intersected with classical trade disciplines, expanding the field's conceptual reach. Today international trade law is under acute strain. The WTO Appellate Body has been paralyzed since December 2019 due to the United States blocking new appointments, prompting a group of members to operate the interim Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement (MPIA). Industrial policy revivals—such as the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS Act, the EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism and Foreign Subsidies Regulation, and China's state-led industrial subsidies—have reignited debates about subsidies, non-market practices, and national security exceptions under GATT Article XXI. Climate-linked trade measures, digital trade, and supply-chain resilience now sit at the heart of the discipline's evolution.

The World Trade Organization, established on 1 January 1995 by the Marrakesh Agreement, absorbed the GATT acquis and added binding rules on services, intellectual property, and a unified dispute settlement system widely described as the 'crown jewel' of the multilateral trading order. Its first decade produced landmark rulings interpreting non-discrimination, technical regulations under the TBT and SPS Agreements, and subsidies disciplines under the ASCM, while the Doha Development Agenda launched in 2001 sought to address agricultural protection, services liberalization, and development concerns. Doha progressively foundered over agricultural subsidies, industrial tariffs, and special and differential treatment, with only partial harvests such as the 2013 Trade Facilitation Agreement and the 2022 fisheries subsidies agreement. The institution's adjudicatory backbone entered crisis when the United States, citing concerns about judicial overreach, mandatory deadlines, and the treatment of zeroing and trade remedies, began blocking Appellate Body appointments in 2017; the body lost its quorum on 11 December 2019. Members responded with the MPIA, now joined by the EU, China, and dozens of others, while non-MPIA disputes can be appealed 'into the void.' Parallel pressures emerged from expansive invocations of the national security exception, beginning with the panel report in Russia—Traffic in Transit (2019) and continuing through disputes over U.S. Section 232 steel and aluminum tariffs and export controls on semiconductors. WTO law today must absorb new substantive challenges—Joint Statement Initiatives on e-commerce and investment facilitation, plurilateral talks on services domestic regulation, climate-related measures such as CBAM, and concerns about non-market policies and practices—while members negotiate dispute settlement reform under the MC12 and MC13 mandates. Core debates concern the proper scope of Article XXI, the legality of green subsidies under the ASCM, the future of S&DT and self-designation as a developing country, and whether consensus-based rulemaking can adapt to a fragmenting geoeconomic environment.