Suttle, O. (2019) “Rules and Values in International Adjudication: The Case of the WTO Appellate Body”, 68:2, International & Comparative Law Quarterly, 399-441 

UPDATE: This paper is now published here.

Excited to have a new paper coming out later this year in International & Comparative Law Quarterly, in which I try to think a bit about the challenges faced by international adjudicators in general, and the WTO Appellate Body in particular, and to draw some connections between those challenges and fundamental questions in jurisprudence, about the nature of law, adjudication and interpretation.

Abstract below. Full text here – PDF

Current political challenges facing the WTO Appellate Body raise fundamental questions about the relationship between rules and values in international adjudication. This paper 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.