U.S. Refusal to Appoint Members Renders WTO Appellate Body Unable to Hear New Appeals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the last few years, the United States has been pressuring the World Trade Organization (WTO) to reform the Appellate Body by refusing proposals to fill vacancies. On December 10, 2019, the terms of two Appellate Body members expired, leaving one member left for the seven-member body. This has brought new appeals to a standstill, as an appeal from a panel established by the Dispute Settlement Body must be heard by three Appellate Body members. In February of 2020, the United States elaborated on its complaints about the Appellate Body in a report published by the Office of the United States Trade Representative. In the spring of 2020, in response to the continued U.S. resistance to filling vacancies on the Appellate Body, a group of WTO members established an interim arrangement to handle appeals through arbitration. Also in the spring of 2020, the United States described as invalid a recent Appellate Body report regarding a dispute between Canada and the United States, asserting that none of the three persons who issued the report were in fact bona fide Appellate Body members.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".