John H. Barton - Böcker

The Evolution of the Trade Regime offers a comprehensive political-economic history of the development of the world's multilateral trade institutions, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its successor, the World Trade Organization (WTO). While other books confine themselves to describing contemporary GATT/WTO legal rules or analyzing their economic logic, this is the first to explain the logic and development behind these rules. The book begins by examining the institutions' rules, principles, practices, and norms from their genesis in the early postwar period to the present. It evaluates the extent to which changes in these institutional attributes have helped maintain or rebuild domestic constituencies for open markets. The book considers these questions by looking at the political, legal, and economic foundations of the trade regime from many angles. The authors conclude that throughout most of GATT/WTO history, power politics fundamentally shaped the creation and evolution of the GATT/WTO system.Yet in recent years, many aspects of the trade regime have failed to keep pace with shifts in underlying material interests and ideas, and the challenges presented by expanding membership and preferential trade agreements.

International Law and The Future of Freedom is the late John Barton's exploration into ways to protect our freedoms in the new global international order. This book forges a unique approach to the problem of democracy deficit in the international legal system as a whole—looking at how international law concretely affects actual governance. The book draws from the author's unparalleled mastery of international trade, technology, and financial law, as well as from a wide array of other legal issues, from espionage law, to international criminal law, to human rights law. The book defines the new and changing needs to assert our freedoms and the appropriate international scopes of our freedoms in the context of the three central issues that our global system must resolve: the balance between security and freedom, the balance between economic equity and opportunity, and the balance between community and religious freedom. Barton explores the institutional ways in which those rights can be protected, using a globalized version of the traditional balance of powers division into the global executive, the global legislature, and the global judiciary.