The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an intergovernmental organization that regulates and facilitates international trade. With effective cooperation in the United Nations System, governments use the organization to establish, revise, and enforce the rules that govern international trade. It officially commenced operations on 1 January 1995, pursuant to the 1994 Marrakesh Agreement, thus replacing the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) that had been established in 1948. The WTO is the world's largest international economic organization, with 164 member states representing over 98% of global trade and global GDP.
The University of Bern is a public research university in the Swiss capital of Bern. It was founded in 1834. It is regulated and financed by the Canton of Bern. It is a comprehensive university offering a broad choice of courses and programs in eight faculties and some 150 institutes. With around 19,000 students, the University of Bern is the third largest university in Switzerland.
Christoph Beat Graber (*1960) is a Swiss legal scholar and professor of legal sociology with particular focus on media law at the University of Zurich since 2015. He was previously a founding member of the Faculty of Law at the University of Lucerne and a consultant to various Swiss federal offices and the OECD on communication, cultural and copyright law issues.
Rufus Hawkins Yerxa is an American lawyer and former U.S. government and international official. He is currently a Senior Advisor with the global consulting firm McClarty Associates. He served as Deputy United States Trade Representative during the George H.W. Bush and Clinton Administrations, and served for 11 years as Deputy Director General of the World Trade Organization (WTO). From 2016 to 2021 he was President of the National Foreign Trade Council.
The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, also known as the Geneva Graduate Institute, is a public-private, government-accredited postgraduate institution of higher education located in Geneva, Switzerland.
International economic law is an increasingly seminal field of international law that involves the regulation and conduct of states, international organizations, and private firms operating in the international economic arena. As such, international economic law encompasses a broad range of disciplines touching on public international law, private international law, and domestic law applicable to international business transactions.
Richard E. Baldwin is a professor of international economics at the IMD Business School and emeritus professor of international economics at the Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies. He was the former President of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). He is Editor-in-Chief of VoxEU, which he founded in June 2007. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and was twice elected as a Member of the Council of the European Economic Association. Baldwin has been called "one of the most important thinkers in this era of global disruption".
Manfred Elsig is Deputy Managing Director and Professor of International Relations at the World Trade Institute of the University of Bern, Switzerland. He was director of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)-funded NCCR Trade Regulation from 2013 until the project ended in 2017. He is co-founder of the collaborative Design of Trade Agreements (DESTA) database. and the Electronic Database of Investment Treaties.He has published more than 30 articles in international peer-reviewed journals.
Joseph Francois is a professor of international economics at the University of Bern, where he has taught since 2013. Since 2015, he is also the Managing Director of the World Trade Institute. He is co-director of the European Trade Study Group, which he co-founded in 1999. He is a research fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and an at-large board member of the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP).
Jamie Paik is a Canadian engineer who is a professor and director of the Reconfigurable Robotics Lab at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.
Peter van den Bossche is a professor of international economic law at the University of Bern. In 2018 he was elected president of the Society of International Economic Law (SIEL). He served as a judge on the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization (WTO) from 2009-2017, following nomination by the European Union and appointment and re-appointment by the Member states of the World Trade Organization. In December 2013 his appointment was renewed. With the end of his formal appointment at the end of 2017, US-driven delays in appointing his replacement alongside US blocking of other key WTO vacancies has meant a growing crisis for the WTO-based multilateral trading system. The election of van den Bossche as SIEL president is considered by some a sign of both defiance to economic nationalism and support for the rules-based multilateral system.
Ursula Röthlisberger is a professor of computational chemistry at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. She works on density functional theory using mixed quantum mechanical/molecular mechanical methods. She is an associate editor of the American Chemical Society Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The Anthology of Swiss Legal Culture makes available a collection of classic and contemporary texts charting Swiss contributions and papers on transcultural influences across various fields of the law. The Anthology is an online work in progress in the English language. The platform offers the editors the opportunity to update, refine and expand introductory texts and to gradually extend it to areas of law not yet covered.
The Centre for Development and Environment (CDE) is an interdisciplinary research centre specializing in sustainability science and land systems at the University of Bern, Switzerland. It conducts research in many countries worldwide, with a particular focus on the Eastern Africa, Southeast Asia, South America, Europe, and Switzerland. In terms of teaching, CDE offers courses in the field of sustainable development at the bachelor’s, master’s, doctoral, and postdoctoral level.
Peter Scheiffele is a German neurobiologist who conducts research at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel, Switzerland.
Claudia R. Binder is a Swiss, Canadian and Colombian environmental scientist working in the field of human-environment systems and sustainability s. Since March 2016 she has been a full professor the La Mobilière Chair on Urban Ecology and Sustainable Living at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland and founding director of the Laboratory for Human-Environment Relations in Urban Systems (HERUS) at School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC) of EPFL. Since January 2020 she has been serving as dean of ENAC at EPFL.
The John H. Jackson Moot Court Competition. is an international moot court competition on WTO law. The competition takes place on a yearly basis, with its first edition dating back to 2002. The competition was formerly known as ELSA Moot Court Competition on WTO but has been renamed in 2018 after the American professor of law John Howard Jackson.
Luciana Vaccaro, is an Italian-Swiss physicist. She has held the position of rector of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Western Switzerland since October 2013.
Joost Pauwelyn is a Belgian professor of international economic law at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, in Geneva, Switzerland, and co-director of the institute's Centre for Trade and Economic Integration. He is an expert in World Trade Organization law. He was Murase Visiting professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center from 2014 to 2021.
