Over the past 10 years, the content and application of international trade law has grown dramatically. The WTO created a binding dispute settlement process and in resolving disputes, the judicial organs of the WTO have built up a substantial amount of new international trade law. Emerging from this new WTO process is an international trade law system that is in some respects self-contained and in other respects overlapping and linked to other international legal, economic and political regimes. The 'boundaries' of trade law are now generating enormous interest and controversy which, at a broader level, is subsumed within the debate over globalization. The detailed development of the rules of international trade is being examined with increasing frequency by scholars, government officials and trade law practitioners. But how does it fit with existing systems? How it is modified by them? How does the international trade law system affect and modify other regimes? This Handbook places international trade law within its broader context, providing comment and critique on contemporary thinking on a range of questions both related specifically to the discipline of international trade law itself and to the outside face of international trade law and its intersection with States and other aspects of the international system. It examines the economic and institutional context of the world trading system, its substantive law (including regional trade regimes) and the settlement of disputes. The final part of the book explores the wider framework of the world trading system, considering issues including the relationship of the WTO to civil society, the use of economic sanctions, state responsibility, and the regulation of multinational corporations.

Daniel Bethlehem is Legal Adviser to the United Kingdom Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Prior to taking up this position, he was Lecturer at the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge and Queens Counsel practising at 20 Essex Street Chambers in London. Donald McRae is the Hyman Soloway Professor of Business and Trade Law at the University of Ottawa. He has been counsel in WTO disputes and has sat on dispute settlement panels under the Canada-US Free Trade, Agreement, NAFTA, the WTO and ICSID. He is a member of the International Law Commission.
Rodney Neufeld is a Legal Officer at the Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, Oceans Law Section. He also teaches international law, including international economic law, at the Universities of Ottawa and Carleton, and is an Executive Committee Member of the Canadian Council on International Law.
Dr. Isabelle Van Damme is a Fellow and College Lecturer at Clare College and Affiliated University Lecturer at the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law. She is also a Fellow at the Lauterpacht Centre of International Law in Cambridge. She has published and lectured on WTO law, EU law, the law of treaties, the fragmentation of international law, and international institutional law.