| dc.description | This book is Volume Seven of an Eight-Volume set. All of the Volumes are available in KU ScholarWorks.About the Author:Born in Toronto of Indian and Celtic heritage, Rakesh (Raj) Kumar Bhala is a dual Canadian-U.S. citizen prominent in the fields of International Trade Law, Islamic Law (Sharī‘a), and Law and Literature. Raj is the inaugural Leo. S. Brenneisen Distinguished Professor at the University of Kansas School of Law (KU Law). He is published widely world-wide – authoring 100 scholarly articles and 13 books, including the International Trade Law Textbook, which has been used at over 100 law schools around the globe. Ingram’s Business Magazine designated him as one of “50 Kansans You Should Know.”Raj has testified before the U.K. Parliament, House of Commons, International Trade Committee, on trade and human rights. Media frequently call upon Raj. Across 65 consecutive months (from January 2017-October 2022), “On Point” was his column on International Law and Economics, which Bloomberg Quint / BQ Prime (Mumbai) published and distributed to approximately 6.2 million readers globally.Raj is a Harvard Law School (HLS) graduate (Cum Laude). As a Marshall Scholar, Raj earned two Master’s degrees, from the London School of Economics (LSE) in Economics, and from Oxford (Trinity College) in Management (Industrial Relations). His undergraduate degree is from Duke (Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa), where he was an Angier B. Duke Scholar and double-majored in Economics and Sociology. After HLS, Raj practiced at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he twice won the President’s Award for Excellence thanks to his service as a delegate to the United Nations Conference on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL), along with a Letter of Commendation from the U.S. Department of State. He is a member of the State Department’s Speaker Program.Raj has served in officer positions at the International Bar Association (IBA) and Inter-Pacific Bar Association (IPBA), on the Executive Board of Directors of the Carriage Club of Kansas City (including as Treasurer), and been on the Alumni Association Board of the University School of Milwaukee (USM), his high school alma mater. He is grateful to his USM teachers for a liberal arts education that made all good things possible. Raj loves fitness training, has finished 115 marathons, including the “Big Five” of the “World’s Majors” (Boston twice, New York twice, Chicago twice, Berlin, and London). He enjoys studying Shakespeare and (especially since becoming Catholic at Easter Vigil 2001) Theology – and watching baseball. | en_US |
| dc.description.abstract | If the question is, “what areas of International Trade Law are blazing?,” then Volume Seven encompasses the answer: free trade agreements (FTAs), labor, and environment. With no end in sight to decades of paralysis at the World Trade Organization (WTO), the “action” on market access and social justice issues is at the regional level. So, Part One covers the theory and practice of FTAs and customs unions. FTAs and customs unions (CUs) are more than economic agreements; they also are instruments to advance political and national security interests of the Parties to them. Philosophies differ as to how ambitious they should be, from American-style exhaustiveness to Indian-style boundedness. Perspectives differ on what countries should be invited into an FTA – Taiwan? And, they differ on whether to remain in a deal – as the Brexit divorce debacle memorably shows. Part Two pays respect to the multilateral disciplines on FTAs and CUs. WTO Members are supposed to adhere to certain parameters when they negotiate, draft, and execute such deals. That they do not always do so is problematic, and helps explain the frenzied activity in this space. No FTA or CU can function without Rules of Origin (ROOs). They are the subject of Part Three. In contrast to ROOs discussed in Volume Three (Customs Law), which are nonpreferential, ROOs in the context of an FTA or CU (or a poor-country preference scheme) are preferential. How, and why, that is so, and what is at stake, are explored in Part Three. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), both version 1.0 and 2.0 (the latter known as the United States Mexico Canada Agreement, or USMCA), furnishes an excellent case study of how ROOs function. NAFTA 1.0 and 2.0 also illustrate how ROOs can advance favored sectoral interests (e.g., autos and auto parts) and labor rights (e.g., wages and dispute settlement), and how they can be looser (encouraging third-country inputs) or tighter (i.e., protectionist). Part Four demonstrates that free trade, in a pure sense, never is purely free. “Free” Trade Agreements are really “Managed Trade Agreements.” Using Staging Categories (SCs), Duty-Free, Quota Free (DFQF) treatment rarely is accorded to 100 percent of merchandise traded among FTA Parties immediately upon Entry into Force (EIF). Likewise, Parties hold back from liberalization commitments certain sensitive sectors, and reserve the right to snapback protections using safeguards. Analogous limitations – sometimes even more protective ones – exist for provisions on services and foreign direct investment (FDI) flows. Parts Five and Six cover labor issues. The linkage between trade and labor rights always mattered, as the 1948 Havana (International Trade Organization, or ITO) Charter prove. Today this link is at the forefront of trade politics and social justice debates. Part Five examines several critical legal and policy questions: What are “internationally recognized workers’ rights”? What role does the ILO play in defining and advancing them? To what extent does an FTA, through (for example) labor arbitration proceedings, enforce those rights? This Part also lays out new rules – such as the U.S. Uyghur Forced Labor Protection Act (UFLPA) – to cleanse merchandise supply chains of forced labor. Because of these questions and rules (plus those concerning the environment in Part Seven and national security in Volume Three), it is not too much of an overstatement to say that International Trade Law is very much about supply chain management. Part Seven covers another vital linkage in world trade, that between trade and the environment. Neither GATT-WTO nor FTA provisions can, by themselves, solve the problem of climate change. But, they can play a role in adaptation and mitigation. This Part begins with in-depth coverage of GATT-WTO exceptions to promote conservation of exhaustible natural resources and support sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures, showing how the restrictive Two Step Test developed through cases dating to the 1990s has limited the practical effect of those exceptions. Accordingly, WTO Members – led by the European Union (EU) – have proposed, and indeed implemented, their own trade-restrictions to deal with climate change. Overall, Volume Seven has an underlying implicit theme of “WTO be damned.” On market access, labor, and environmental matters, some WTO Members have ceased waiting for action at the multilateral level. They are pursuing their interests in these areas – otherwise, they are left behind by not only certain other Members, but also their own domestic constituencies. Like the other seven Volumes of International Trade Law: A Comprehensive E-Textbook, this Volume is available Open Access, and thus freely, quickly downloadable. | |
