The Oxford Handbook of International Trade Law seeks to give an overview of international trade law and to present the trade regime in its political, institutional and legal context. The handbook is organized in five parts, covering respectively the evolution of the trading system, parts of the substantive law of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the WTO's dispute settlement system, the relationship between trade and other policy objectives (‘linkage’), as well as the wider institutional and political context of the trading system. The editors largely succeed in their stated endeavour not to replicate existing work. While some of the chapters summarize or are based on already published material, many of them break new ground, such as Craig Forcese's chapter on the regulation of multinational corporations. Others present familiar debates in innovative and instructive ways—Daniel Bodansky's and Jessica Lawrence's chapter on trade and environment is particularly notable in this regard. Moreover, not only do the chapters present discussions of various aspects of trade law, but they also exemplify different ways of thinking about the trade regime and of approaching the study of the WTO. For example, both Andrew Lang and Joseph Weiler draw attention to the conceptual and cultural underpinnings of the trade regime and show how law and legal interpretations both shape and reflect the evolution of knowledge and broader value systems. In many respects the book thus represents an extremely rich resource.

Paradoxically, this very diversity of perspectives and the lack of uniformity in the way the authors approach their topics make it hard to see how the book could serve as a ‘handbook’. While there are many legitimate conceptions of what a handbook should offer, most readers would certainly expect it to provide a guide to the most important concepts, issues and debates in a particular field. The chapters in this book fulfil this expectation to varying degrees. At one end of the spectrum, the TRIPS chapter by Andrew Mitchell and Tania Voon offers an almost textbook-style overview of major developments and outstanding issues regarding intellectual property protection. The TRIPS chapter is also one of the few chapters that provide an extensive bibliography as a guide to further reading. Similarly, David Gantz offers a succinct and well-structured introduction to the relationship of regional trade agreements to the WTO system. Much more detailed discussions are provided by the six chapters in the dispute settlement section: The institutional set-up of the WTO dispute settlement system, its jurisdiction, the applicable law, interpretation, procedure and evidence, remedies and compliance, and in particular the standard of review are explored at a level of detail that at times appears out of proportion to the attention devoted to other issues (most strikingly, the chapter on standard of review runs to 60 pages as compared to the average of 25 pages of most other chapters). While these chapters go significantly beyond what one might expect from a handbook, they will be useful for both specialist academics and practitioners working in dispute settlement. At the other end of the spectrum, some authors choose to pursue a particular argument in the style of a journal article. This approach may suit some topics that are hardly explored in the literature, such as the question whether trade law is the appropriate avenue to discipline multinational corporations, or whether it would be fruitful to enhance the role of WTO law in UN operations, as the authors of chapter 25 argue (unconvincingly in this reviewer's mind). In other cases, however, for example when Marcos Orellana addresses the debate about legitimacy and democracy in the WTO primarily through the lens of ‘civil society’ participation and human rights and environmental law, this approach appears less appropriate, as it leaves a large part of the literature out of the picture and gives the reader no appreciation of alternative idioms in which the issues at hand might be, and indeed are, explored.Footnote ¹

Yet other authors offer observations on very specific problems which may be interesting on their own, but might not be of much relevance to readers looking for guidance on a larger topic such as the GATT. Federico Ortino's chapter on the latter agreement provides an excellent discussion of core GATT obligations and the general exceptions. Framing his discussion of the general exceptions with the question of whether GATT article XX provides for a ‘cost-effectiveness test’ or ‘cost-benefit balancing’, Ortino succeeds in expounding the interpretative stakes with admirable clarity. In the third part of his chapter, however, Ortino chooses to focus on the very specific issues of the relationship between the WTO and the International Monetary Fund in the administration of balance of payments exceptions as well as a potential conflict between the GATT and the Safeguards Agreement. These questions raise larger issues about the relationship between the WTO and other international organizations as well as conflicts of norms in WTO law, which would have made for useful chapters of their own. In the context of a handbook chapter on the GATT, however, it might have been more useful to introduce the Agreement's treatment of ‘state contingencies’ more broadly, especially since those who are actually interested in the issues raised by Ortino would not necessarily expect to find them discussed in the context of an introductory chapter on the GATT. A similar ‘hidden treasures’ problem affects Joseph Weiler's concluding chapter, which offers important but somewhat disconnected observations on constitutionalization, the role of regional trade agreements as well as the interpretation of the national treatment obligation in WTO law.

A detailed introductory chapter could have gone a long way towards compensating for the unevenness between the chapters, helping the reader to navigate the 26 relatively long contributions and making the book easier to use. However, the two-page introduction does not fulfil this function. Apart from articulating the book's ambition to present trade law in a ‘broader context’ (1), it merely gives an overview of the different sections of the book and does not introduce any chapter in more than one sentence.

Arguably, a structure with more and shorter chapters would have been more suitable for a handbook (for comparison: the World Bank's Handbook on Development, Trade and the WTO, which is shorter than the book under review, has 55 chapters). Shorter chapters with more extensive cross-references would not only have helped to avoid the significant overlap between some chapters (especially on GATT article XX) but would also have allowed the editors to be more inclusive. For while the book covers a lot of ground, there are some obvious lacunae. Thus, two of the most contentious issues in international trade law, agriculture and trade remedies, receive little attention. The special status of trade in agricultural products reflected in the Agreement on Agriculture, and the controversies about agricultural subsidies that will probably dominate the agenda of international trade negotiations for years to come, are not addressed at all. Some aspects of trade remedy law are discussed tangentially in the chapters on GATT and standard of review, but neither anti-dumping, subsidies nor safeguards—issues which account for a substantial proportion of WTO disputes—are systematically introduced. The chapter which one might have expected to do just that—chapter 9, entitled ‘Responding to National Concerns’—instead reproduces a shortened version of an article often quoted and thrice published already on the GATT, TBT and SPS Agreements by Gabrielle Marceau and Joel P Trachtman.Footnote ² The overlap between this ‘map of WTO law of domestic regulations of goods’, as the previous incarnations of the chapter are entitled, and the chapters on the GATT and trade and health (covering the SPS Agreement) is significant.

The third lacuna in the book's substantive coverage is arguably the problems and opportunities facing developing countries in the world trading system—the ‘most important issue on the WTO agenda’, as Gilbert Winham puts it (p 28). Hunter Nottage's chapter on trade and development provides an excellent discussion of the obstacles that prevent developing countries from making effective use of the WTO's dispute settlement system. Drawing on his insider experience as a counsel at the Advisory Centre on WTO Law, which supports developing countries in WTO litigation, the author convincingly argues that most developing countries' marginal role in dispute settlement is explained by the fact that a large proportion of these countries' trade takes place under non-binding preference schemes. However, the chapter does not really address the broader relationship between trade and development, and would have fitted more properly into the Dispute Settlement section of the book, leaving other aspects of development—such as the participation of developing countries in trade negotiations, the scope and meaning of special and differential treatment, and legal aspects of preference schemes such as rules of origin, to name but a few—to be more comprehensively discussed in a separate chapter.

Overall, the workings of the WTO as a law-making forum, as opposed to its dispute settlement role, are underexplored. Many of the contributors voice concern about the WTO's performance as a ‘negotiating machine’ (p 28),Footnote ³ and in his chapter on the institutional framework of the WTO Pieter Jan Kuijper gives an excellent overview of the WTO's institutional structure and the powers of its organs. He also presents an interesting argument for a non-plenary board or council to streamline everyday decision-making in the WTO, proposing the ILO's Governing Body as a model. However, there is little discussion in any of the chapters of other controversial hallmarks of the WTO's negotiating process, such as the single undertaking and the consensus procedure. And one of the key questions for the WTO's future, raised by Federico Ortino, namely whether the WTO will be able ‘to move away from a system based on quid pro quo, mercantilistic bargains towards a system that favours the search for sound disciplines truly beneficial to, and sustainable for, the entire membership’ (p 138), remains entirely unexplored.

On other contentious issues in international economic law several of the chapters advance interesting perspectives and proposals which will hopefully stimulate further debate. Gabrielle Marceau's chapter explores the scope that the WTO system leaves its members to pursue ‘labour and social progress objectives’ (p 568); it is arguably the most critical contribution regarding the path that the trade regime has taken. Craig Forcese's proposal to reform investor-state dispute settlement to allow states or even third parties affected by an investor's violation of applicable standards to bring claims against the investor in an international adjudicative forum deserves careful consideration. And Joseph Weiler's challenge to ‘market functionality’ (p 765) as the only acceptable comparator in determining the ‘likeness’ of products is a powerful plea to constantly re-examine the received wisdom about the identity, purpose and priorities of the trading system.

In conclusion, there can be little doubt that some of the chapters will find their way into the canon of international economic law scholarship and will be widely used in academia and trade law practice alike. As a comprehensive handbook, however, the book falls short. It may be a case of the whole being less than the sum of its parts.