UCL CLP: Language, the WTO and International Agricultural Trade (Smith)
Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 6:00 PM (GMT)
CURRENT LEGAL PROBLEMS LECTURE SERIES 2009-10:
Language, the WTO and International Agricultural Trade
Dr Fiona Smith
UCL Law Faculty
Chaired by
The Rt Hon The Lord Woolf
on 19 November 2009, from 6-7pm
Venue:
UCL Law Faculty
Bentham House
Endsleigh Gardens
London WC1H 0EG
About this lecture:
Scholars and practitioners argue that failures in
international agricultural trade regulation in the World Trade
Organisation arise because the existing rules are unable to prevent
states from using trade measures which disrupt the natural flow of
agricultural goods in and out of their domestic markets. According to
their ideas, better rules are needed to re-establish the free market in
agricultural products. This suggestion is based on assumptions about
the role of language. That is, that language is like a tool box: all
the words and sentence constructions are available at any time in the
box and we only need to select what we need to fulfil a task. Seen in
these terms, the problem of international agricultural trade is
elf-evident, it is merely that we have selected the wrong language
‘tools’ from our proverbial tool box. In this lecture, I will suggest
that this conception of language’s role in regulation is too limited.
Instead I will sketch out a project which offers a more dynamic role
for language. Specifically what language does and how it does it;
whether it is possible, using language scholarship as a methodological
approach, to determine where the boundary is between what can be said
and what cannot be said by the agricultural trade community of
scholars, negotiators and civil society representatives, and, how this
might translate into the WTO rules on agriculture; how far the language
used in the WTO Agreement on Agriculture (or any amendments) can be
‘stretched’ to accommodate multiple meanings and what those meanings
might be. That is, can the precise range of meanings be predicted using
language as the methodology? What it means to interpret a treaty and
how this works in the context of international agricultural trade.
Whilst the lecture focuses on international agricultural trade in the
WTO, general comments on language have resonance for many other areas
of international law.
About the speaker:
Dr Fiona Smith is a lecturer at UCL Law Faculty. Her research interests have focused on international agricultural trade law under
the GATT and WTO and the philosophical underpinnings of the WTO regime. She
is currently working on a book for Edward Elgar entitled ‘Agriculture
and the WTO: towards a WTO model for international agricultural trade regulation.’ She is the founding director of the WTO Scholars' Forum, an initiative designed to bring together experts
on the law of the World Trade Organization to discuss topical issues. She is
also on the Membership Committee for the Society of International Economic Law
and a member of the American Society of International
Law, the International Law Association,
the Institute of Learning and Teaching and the Society of Legal Scholars.
Bentham House
Endsleigh Gardens
WC1H 0EG London
United Kingdom
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