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There are two widely accepted explanations of why politically-motivated governments make trade agreements. There is an informal explanation, which I shall call the "practitioners' story", even though it is most economists' informal view as well. And there is a formal explanation in the economics literature, which I shall call the "standard model", referring to the basic structure shared by the Bagwell-Staiger and Grossman-Helpman models. Unfortunately, the practitioners' story and the standard model contradict each other at every crucial point. For example, in the practitioners' story, trade agreements are about reducing politically-motivated protectionism; and getting an agreement depends on political support from exporters. But in the standard model, trade agreements never reduce such protectionism; and politics plays no role in securing an agreement. This paper expounds the contradictions between the practitioners' story and the standard model, which have gone largely unremarked. It refutes suggestions by defenders of the standard model that the contradictions are illusory. It identifies the different assumptions made by the two explanations that generate the contradictions. It gives reasons for skepticism about the standard model. And it discusses why all of this matters.

Based on address.

Like many people these days, I believe there is no general moral obligation to obey the law. I shall explain why there is no such moral obligation – and I shall clarify what I mean when I say there is no moral obligation to obey the law – as we proceed. But also like many people, I am unhappy with a position that would say there was no moral obligation to obey the law and then say no more about the law's moral significance. In our thinking about law in a resonably just society, we have a strong inclination to invest law with a sort of moral halo. It does not feel right to suggest that law is a morally neutral social fact, nor to suggest that law is merely a useful social technique.In this essay, I shall try to account in part for law's moral halo. (Let me emphasize "in part"; I do not purport to say everything that could be said.) Because I share the widespread inclination to invest law with this halo, I shall not be interested in a merely historical account of how we come to see law with a halo – a pure "error theory" of law's halo, if you will. I want to justify the halo. On the other hand, the main way to justify the halo is to get clear just what law's moral significance is. It is unlikely that at the end of the process of clarification the halo will have exactly the shape or luminance that it had at the beginning.

It is argued that the theory of evaluator-relative consequent-based morality propounded by Amartya Sen ("Rights and Agency," Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1982, winter, 11, 1, 3-39) cannot account for judgments about the rightness of actions. Since traditional consequentialism defines an action by its consequences, the state of affairs that results from an action cannot be understood from a subjective evaluator-relative point of view. Rightness or goodness of an act is best comprehended from the evaluator-neutral position, which avoids the emotional entanglements of the actors. Attempts by Sen to integrate deontology with consequentialism will not find favor in either camp. In Evaluator Relativity and Consequential Evaluation, Amartya Sen responds to Regan's criticism, claiming that he fails to grasp the concept of evaluator-relative consequentialism; judgments about the rightness of action can only be understood by reviewing the entire state of affairs, in conjunction with the subjective motives underlying an action & the consequence of the act. Regan's contention that no distinction can be drawn between evaluator-relative consequentialism & deontology is rebutted. W. Adams.

The EC-Seals case stemmed from complaints by Canada and Norway against European Union regulations that effectively banned the importation and marketing of seal products from those countries. The EU said it had responded to European moral outrage at the killing of seals. Canada and Norway challenged the regime under various provisions of the Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) Agreement and the GATT. This analysis looks primarily at the WTO panel decision and considers issues such as whether there is any bright line to be drawn between legitimate and illegitimate purposes in regulation and the proper legal meaning of a "technical regulation."

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