Since the birth of World Trade Organization dispute settlement in 1995, it’s been an open secret that although nations are the named parties, they usually file suit at the behest of private interests, and routinely farm out the work to lawyers paid by industry.
In the WTO’s very first appeal, Standards for Reformulated and Conventional Gasoline (1996), the oil industry paid the fees of the U.S. outside counsel. In its “EC Bananas” report of the next year, the WTO’s Appellate Body tacitly blessed the system by holding that Saint Lucia had the right to choose private counsel, and expressing no interest in whether a banana company was paying that lawyer’s bills. In the trade literature nobody even refers to U.S./EU or U.S./Japan anymore. The cases are now called Boeing/Airbus or Kodak/Fuji.
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