Articles

• Trachtman, JP

Abstract

The complex bananas litigation could serve as a course in international economic law, as it raises a rich set of issues that arise in a highly contentious circumstance and present difficult issues of legal policy. At the core of this litigation is the question of compliance with law. This comment briefly and selectively reviews the legal manoeuvring in the European Community, the GATT, the World Trade Organization and the US, as a basis for an analysis of the problem of compliance in the GATT/WTO system, and the relation of direct effect to compliance. This comment argues that hard law is not necessarily good law, and that strengthened implementation, including possible direct effect, is not necessarily desirable. This seems obvious once we recognize that, putting aside for a moment transaction costs and strategic costs, states generally have the level of compliance that they want. The correct role for scholars and for lawyers involved with these issues is to help political decision-makers to identify circumstances in which, due to such problems, states have not achieved the desired level of compliance.