Corruption in the World Trade Organization: Discerning the Limits of the World Trade Organization's Authority
![handle is hein.journals/nyuilp28 and id is 719 raw text is: CORRUPTION IN THE WORLD TRADE
ORGANIZATION: DISCERNING THE LIMITS
OF THE WORLD TRADE
ORGANIZATION'S AUTHORTIY
PILwP M. NICHOLS*
The creation of the World Trade Organization was her-
alded as an epiphanous event in the legal regulation of the
global economy. In contrast to the World Trade Organiza-
tion's predecessor, the GATT, the World Trade Organization
is an entity with substance, permanence, and the seeming abil-
ity to strictly enforce the rules that it imposes on its members.'
The advent of the Organization was deemed the most signifi-
cant event in the process of globalization in this half of the
* Assistant Professor of Legal Studies, The Wharton School of the Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania. K-B., Harvard; J.D., LLM. (foreign and interna-
tional law), Duke. Helpful comments and critiques were provided on an
earlier draft of this article by Gerhard Mueller, Richard Shell, Ann Mayer,
William Laufer, Susan Freiwald, Alan Strudler, and participants at a presen-
tation at the annual meeting of the Academy of Legal Studies in Business in
Quebec City, Quebec, Canada. Invaluable research assistance was provided
by Nhung Tran.
1. The GATT, which administered the General Agreement on Tariffs
and Trade, was not formally even an institution. Its historical roots explain
the difficulty in describing it. In the dosing years of the second World War,
negotiators from several countries worked to create an international trade
organization. In order to safeguard the trade concessions that they had
agreed to and to immediately enjoy the benefits of trade liberalization, the
negotiators pieced together an interim, temporary trade agreement, the
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, Oct. 30, 1947, T.I.A.S. 1700, 55
U.N.T.S. 188 [hereinafter the General Agreement]. For political reasons,
this temporary agreement purposefully made no reference to an interna-
tional organization and left all decisionmaking in the hands of the parties to
the agreement acting as a group. Moreover, the agreement was not a treaty
but was instead acceded to by means of a Provisional Protocol of Applica-
tion. Shortly after the temporary agreement was acceded to, it became clear
the United States Congress would not ratify the proposed charter for he
International Trade Organization. The temporary agreement, which was
neither a treaty nor created an organization, became the cornerstone of in-
ternational trade regulation for the next fortseven years. For excellent his-
tories, see RoBERT E. HuDEC, THE GATT LEGAL SsTEM AmD WoRLD TRADE
Dnn-omAcy (2d ed. 1990);JoHN H. JACKSON, REsTRuCrURING THE GATT Si-
TEI (1990).
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Corruption in the World Trade Organization: Discerning the Limits of the World Trade Organization's Authority
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