Making General Exceptions: The Spell of Precedents in Developing Article XX GATT into Standards for Domestic Regulatory Policy

Abstract

Judicial lawmaking in the GATT/WTO context has for some time drawn considerable attention. Some are inclined to show a sense of existentialist anxiety in view of the fact that legal practice does not neatly live up to the orthodox doctrinal order of things. Others see judicial lawmaking as (theoretically or practically) inevitable and tend to readily embrace it as a way of overcoming defunct political processes.

Dr. Ingo Venzke, LL.M., is a Research Fellow at the University of Amsterdam, formerly Hauser Research Scholar at New York University and Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg. Many thanks to Armin von Bogdandy, Giacinto della Cananea, Isabel Feichtner, Michael Ioannidis, Nicolas Lamp and Richard Stewart for their critique of earlier versions of this contribution.