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COPYRIGHT 2005 Georgetown University Law Center
International trade law is essentially part of international law. There is no way to disentangle the subjects. There is, by definition, a very, very deep reliance on international law for trade matters. Indeed, economies throughout the world, including the U.S. economy, are becoming more and more dependent on trade for their economic well-being in every conceivable way. The United States now requires or depends on trade for approximately eighteen percent of its general domestic economy. This is about triple what it was several decades ago. Trade is the area of international relations in which the United States most relies on international law. Particularly as to the allegation that the United States is generally unilateral, in the area of trade I would maintain that it is mostly multilateral. So trade is an example of the very strong importance and use of international law by the United States.
Now 9/11 has raised a number of reasons to rethink all of international law, and, indeed, the current situation with respect to trade raises some of those issues. Central to those issues is the concept of sovereignty. Although sovereignty has been described as a concept of organized hypocrisy, it is really how we allocate power in a very large number of institutions in the world today. When a decision is made in Geneva or Washington or Sacramento or Berkeley or some other level of government (and you can do the same ladder of power in Europe adding the additional layer of the European Community), you can see in the area of international trade many, many manifestations of this. Many basic questions are being raised in trade itself despite the reliance on international law, questions of which norms...
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