Explore the vast range of titles available.

Current political challenges facing the WTO Appellate Body raise fundamental questions about the relationship between rules and values in international adjudication. This article applies insights from legal philosophy to identify the role values should play in WTO adjudication. It argues that nothing about the specifics of WTO law would justify excluding values from adjudication; that the doctrinal, political and institutional context of WTO adjudication makes a positivist account of the role of values untenable; but an anti-positivist account requires complementing established economic accounts of WTO law's purpose with an account of fairness and justice in trade and trade regulation.

Existing theories of WTO law cannot adequately explain the form or content of the GATT exceptions, in particular Article XX(a) Public Morals. Nor, in consequence, can they satisfactorily answer the interpretive questions they raise. This article explains Article XX in terms of self-determination as a political and moral value, and the choices it mandates peoples make for themselves. Drawing on debates in contemporary political philosophy, it distinguishes three categories of argument for self-determination: intrinsic, expressive and instrumental, each having implications for the scope of the choices a self-determining community must make for itself. This account of self-determination in trade regulation is used to reconstruct Article XX, both explaining the individual provisions, and suggesting how these might be developed and interpreted. It concludes by examining Article XX(a) in detail, highlighting the interpretive questions public morals pose, and how understanding Article XX in terms of self-determination suggests these should be answered.

What role should concerns about distributive justice play in international investment law? This paper argues that answers to fundamental and contestable questions of social and global distributive justice are a necessary, if implicit, premise of international investment law. In particular, they shape our views on the purpose of investment law, and in turn determine the scope of authority that investment law can claim, and that states should accord it. The implausibility of achieving international consensus on these questions constitutes a substantial objection to the harmonization of investment law or the consistent operation of a multilateral investment court.

While Risse and Wollner make an important contribution to theorising global justice and trade, I identify certain concerns with their approach and suggest an alternative that addresses these. First, I query their emphasis on subjection to the trade regime as a morally salient feature, suggesting their argument trades on an ambiguity, and fails to connect the trade regime, as a trigger, with their preferred account of trade-justice-as-non-exploitation. Second, I examine their treatment of the WTO, how they understand international organisations as inheritors of states’ obligations, and how far an organisation like the WTO can or should be self-consciously reoriented towards justice-as-non-exploitation. Third, I ask how their account is distinct from existing approaches, and whether it makes sense to apply the same conception of justice across diverse agents and institutions. I conclude by sketching an alternative approach, which makes the justification of states’ policies to outsiders the central problem of trade justice.