This course offers an advanced introduction to international trade law, with particular emphasis on the legal framework of the World Trade Organization (WTO). With 166 Members, the rules of the WTO govern around 98 per cent of global trade. Yet the rules-based multilateral trading system has come under increasing strain in recent years, marked by tariff wars, rising protectionism, and a deepening institutional crisis.
Against this backdrop, the course examines the laws, principles, and jurisprudence of the WTO, situating them within contemporary geopolitical and economic developments. It also critically engages with the enduring tensions between trade liberalisation and the need to preserve domestic regulatory space for legitimate public policy objectives, including public health, environmental protection, and national security.
We will explore the origins and evolution of the WTO, its institutional structure, and the core agreements governing trade in goods, dispute settlement, intellectual property rights, trade remedies, health-related measures, and technical standards. Through close textual analysis of key provisions of the WTO Covered Agreements, complemented by critical engagement with jurisprudence from the WTO Dispute Settlement Body and in-class exercises based on hypothetical dispute scenarios, the course will equip students with a foundational understanding of the core principles of international trade law.
The course also addresses the contemporary challenges facing the multilateral trading system, including trade wars, the resurgence of protectionism, emerging trade issues, and ongoing institutional reform debates. By integrating doctrinal analysis with case law, policy discussions, and real-world controversies, the course is intended to provide students with the analytical tools needed to critically assess the role of international trade law in global governance.
The increasingly interconnected global economy with its extended value chains produces new challenges for gender justice issues. In this module we will consider the ways in which gender relations are shaped by international economic dynamics, characterised by processes of colonisation, globalisation, migration, marketisation, financialization, and digitalisation. Through engagement with feminist scholarship and case studies we will explore how these interconnected processes pose new legal, regulatory and socioeconomic challenges for gender justice. We will consider the question: Who do we care about? Who are ‘we’? If we care about distant others, how do we do this? Through the discourses of trade/labour/social security/human rights/corporate social responsibility including ethical codes of practice and fair-trade initiatives or through local and transnational feminist activism?
This module is concerned with the regulation of labour relations in the UK and global context. It combines legal analysis with the development of interdisciplinary, critical and evaluative perspectives on the conceptualisation and regulation of work, as shaped by processes of globalisation, migration, and digitalisation. The module regards ‘work’ as central to questions of economic and social justice and to the design of national, international and transnational policies.