Arrested norm development: The failure of legislative-judicial dialogue in the WTO
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The WTO’s 30-year history has been marked by a well-known imbalance: while WTO Members have largely failed to negotiate new legal rules, the WTO’s dispute settlement system has been extraordinarily active. This imbalance has created the perception that WTO law is mostly developed by the WTO’s judicial organs, which has in turn sparked a backlash against the WTO’s dispute settlement system. The article explores the reasons why WTO Members have failed to do their part in shaping norm development in the WTO. The article builds on the existing explanations to provide a fuller picture of what has blocked Member-driven norm development. Specifically, it highlights the ways in which divergent views about the scope of the judicial function in the WTO have shaped the approaches of key players to legislative overruling; the negotiating principles in the WTO that legitimize demands for ‘payment’ even for interpretations that would simply restore the original bargain; and WTO Members’ desire to preserve the pragmatic and legally innocuous character of the WTO’s councils and committees. The article proposes a conceptual framework for thinking about the institutional design challenges that are at the heart of the crisis of WTO dispute settlement and situates various reform proposals within that framework. As WTO Members contemplate the revival of legislative-judicial dialogue as one of the key planks of the reform of the WTO dispute settlement system, developing a fuller understanding of why that dialogue has failed in the past is more important than ever.
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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.106 | 0.123 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.063 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.015 | 0.024 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".