Author granted license

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Summer 2018

ISSN

0017-8063

Publisher

Harvard Law School

Language

en-US

Abstract

In private law theory and in international trade law alike, a new strand of scholarship has emerged in recent years. This strand is characterized by a focus on market actors who are excluded from deals struck by other parties and suffer economic hardship as a result. Scholars have also focused on doctrines and legal concepts apt to identify this type of hardship and to provide non-parties with justiciable claims and remedies. Private-law and trade-law scholars involved in this mode of research are often moved by justice concerns and by the realization that rules based solely on the enforcement of bilateral deals may be structurally antithetical to a progressive distribution of resources. Towards the goal of contributing to this literature, I draw inspiration and materials from comparative private-law theory. I then review a range of private law doctrines designed to protect non-parties from the negative externalities of discrete agreements, and show how the use of private law analogies in the context of trade theory yields both analytical pay-offs and normative caveats. I conclude that the ongoing attempts to identify, within the framework of international trade law, actionable remedies in favor of non-parties to trade agreements are analytically helpful, but remain distributionally ambivalent and need stronger normative vectors.

Find on SSRN

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.