Database info

TradeLawGuide is a comprehensive tool for researching World Trade Organization (WTO) law, including WTO and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) jurisprudence.
The database provides access to:

• WTO and GATT jurisprudence, including reports, awards, and decisions.
• Commentary on WTO jurisprudence and procedural documents from WTO cases.
• Jurisprudence citators that track how WTO/GATT cases have been cited in subsequent cases.
• Annotated WTO and pre-WTO agreements and instruments, enriched with explanatory notes.
• An Article Citator for pinpointing references to specific provisions of WTO agreements and instruments, complete with summaries and text extracts.
• Information on pending WTO disputes, providing insight into ongoing cases.
• The Terms & Phrases tool, which indexes definitions and interpretations of terms used in WTO agreements and jurisprudence.
• Uruguay Round negotiating documents and precursor texts, offering historical context to current WTO agreements.

TradeLawGuide offers special tools to enable users to update (e.g., “note up” or “shepardise”) references to provisions of WTO agreements and to paragraphs and footnotes of reports, awards, and decisions. This is crucial because, while Panel and Appellate Body reports are not binding, the Appellate Body has made it clear that they should be considered where relevant. Relevance can be quickly and accurately determined.

The main research tools include:

• Subject Navigator: an innovative index that serves as a gateway to the subject matter of the specific provisions of WTO agreements and instruments and of other subject matter.
• Agreements, Annotations & Citations:provides fully annotated texts of WTO agreements that have a large body of WTO jurisprudence, enabling fast and efficient research.
• Jurisprudence Citators: shows whether, where and how WTO reports, awards, and decisions (i.e., WTO jurisprudence) have been subsequently cited by the Appellate Body, panels and arbitrators in the context of legal reasoning and findings. It does not include references to jurisprudence cited solely in argument sections or in submissions that are annexed to reports, awards and decisions.
• Interpretation tool: provides all the legal principles and jurisprudence on the rules of treaty interpretation under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties and other specific WTO rules.
• Terms & Phrases: provides information on terms and phrases defined in the texts of the WTO agreements and instruments or elaborated upon in statements in WTO reports, awards and decisions.
• DSB Minutes: contain discussions of policy and other issues that arise in respect of WTO jurisprudence (reports, awards and decisions).
• Pending: provides information on ongoing disputes for which reports, awards or decisions are pending that may address WTO provisions that you are researching.
• Text Search: enables you to conduct full text searches using various methods including boolean routines. You can search all categories of documents or narrow a search to a specific category or select categories.

The database is updated daily.

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