Among my dearest memories of John Jackson and his wife Joan are the four weeks spent in Ann Arbor as a guest lecturer at the Michigan Law School in the mid-nineties, briefly after the entry into force of the WTO package of agreements. It was great to be away for some weeks from the relentless pressure of work in the WTO group in the Legal Service of the European Commission, which I was heading at the time. I taught a seminar on EC external relations, but also sat in on John's lectures on international trade law and naturally our discussions centered on the WTO and how the new dispute settlement system was going to work.

I told John how I had discovered in a GATT anti-dumping case with the US, which I had argued in front of a panel, that the US was advancing a standard of review that was based on the so-called Chevron doctrine from the Supreme Court case of that name.Footnote ¹ How I had read by pure chance an article in the Yale Law Review on that case and thus recognized the terminology used by the US in its pleadings – that contained no hint of the internal US law source that the US lawyers wanted adopted by the GATT panel. And how helpful that had been in understanding the demands in extremis for changes made by the US side to have similar language included in Article 17(6) of the Anti-Dumping Agreement in an attempt to modify the international law rules of treaty interpretation that were applicable to all WTO Agreements specifically for anti-dumping.

John was very interested in this question and it turned out that he had already thought a lot about the problem of the relationship between the normal rules of treaty interpretation and the quasi-Chevron rules that would be applied if the rules of Article 31 and 32 of the Vienna Convention ended in a stalemate between two ‘permissible interpretations’. He asked me about the European ‘margin of appreciation’ and about how it could be applied possibly by WTO panels and the Appellate Body. He introduced me to his young colleague Steve Croley who was a specialist in administrative law and knew everything there was to know about Chevron. Together we speculated about how the Chevron rules might fare in the hands of a WTO panel, if and when it ever got that far. I believed it hardly would, since Articles 31 and 32 constituted a complete interpretative framework. Any serious (international) lawyer applying it would normally end up with one interpretation, not with two permissible ones.

This was by no means the only subject we discussed during those weeks, but it was representative of how John worked. He was very gregarious and was ready to take on nearly every subject in international economic law and in international law generally. He was always interested in the big legal and political issues behind the disputes about the black letter rules, but never neglected the detail of the black letter rules either. The discussions thus nearly always spilled over into politics and international relations, only to return to the legal nitty-gritty at some point. Solving the nitty-gritty problems was for John the key to coming, slowly, but hopefully surely, to a solution of the big issue behind it. That was the way of the GATT; it was also the way originally of the European Community (which remained a source of life-long fascination for John, even if he feared to tread on this ground as a legal scholar).

I cannot say that I was surprised that a year after my visit John and Steve Croley published a short and excellent article on the standard of review and deference to national governments in the WTO dispute settlement procedure.Footnote ² All our earlier discussions seemed to point in that direction. On re-reading the piece, I was struck by how well it has survived the twenty years that have gone by. It is still a wonderful first introduction into the problems surrounding the introduction of a national standard of review next to international norms of interpretation.Footnote ³ I do not think that I do Steve Croley injustice, when I say that particularly the international parts of the article show some of John's strengths. The combination of an eye for detail (copious footnotes chockfull of fascinating additional information) with concern for the big problem (sovereignty is still important in the WTO and there must be some deference to that) clearly comes to the fore. The sheer amount of knowledge that John had of the GATT, and of the WTO under construction, is palpable. His willingness to go out and complement his knowledge by interviewing all and sundry is also on display (there is a footnote referring to such interviews). Finally, although John was not normally somebody for the big laugh, he could make you chuckle even in an academic article. In a long footnote on the lack of a good historical record of the Uruguay Round negotiations, he refers to former negotiators who have gone over to private practice and who before congressional committees have tried to sell their negotiating experience as evidence of the negotiating history, and terminates thus: ‘in some cases, these persons have received fees for such testimony from a party in interest. Such testimony cannot always be given full credibility’.Footnote ⁴ Case closed.

The capacity of a man to write a short sentence in a long footnote that at the same time makes a scholarly point and puts down a piece of human folly is what made John positively lovable.