UCL's Institute for Global Law / IUS Commune Lecture Series presents

Non Discrimination in WTO: Revisited, the ALI Study

on Thursday 27 October 2011, from 1-2pm

Speaker:

Professor Petros Mavroidis, Columbia Law School

Chair:
Dr Ioannis Lianos, UCL 

About the lecture
The project 'Principles of International Trade: the World Trade Organization' is an American Law Institute (ALI) study. Henrik Horn and Petros C. Mavroidis (Columbia Law School) are the Chief Reporters of the study, and Kyle W. Bagwell (Stanford, Economics), Gene M. Grossman (Princeton, Economics), Robert W. Staiger (Stanford, Economics) and Alan O. Sykes (Stanford Law School) are the reporters. Doug Irwin (Dartmouth, Economics) was an invited author. This event will briefly revisit the whole study, while focusing on the principle of non-discrimination with respect to domestic policies.

About the speaker
Petros Mavroidis joined Columbia as a half-time faculty member (teaching in the fall) after four semesters as a visiting professor. Prof. Mavroidis, who earned his law degree at the University of Thessaloniki and has an LL.M. from Berkeley, originally focused his work on antitrust and public international law. Because the subject of international trade encompasses both areas, and because the field was gaining popularity in the late 1980s, he decided to pursue his Ph.D. in the subject. Since then, his work has been primarily on the WTO.

Prof. Mavroidis, who worked in the WTO's legal division in the 1990s, has written extensively on the organization and its predecessor, GATT. Judging from the increasing enrollment in Prof. Mavroidis's courses on the WTO, there is also a growing appreciation of its relevance in the world today. Prof. Mavroidis has remained active with the WTO. While teaching at the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland, he spent several days each month as a pro bono lawyer at the WTO, helping developing countries to settle disputes. Prof. Mavroidis is also involved with the American Law Institute as a chief co-reporter on the principles of WTO law, which will lead eventually to a series of legal recommendations. He says he hopes to see the WTO succeed not against the wheels of governments but as a consensus-driven organization.

From summer 2011 Prof. Mavroidis will be teaching at European University Institute, Florence, Italy.