This is a book about current problems affecting the law and institutions of the World Trade Organization (WTO). The particular problems treated in this book have recently risen to particular prominence due to the WTO's decision, at its November 2001 Ministerial Meeting in Doha, Qatar, to launch a new round of trade negotiations. The need to deal with these issues was a key reason for launching the new negotiations, while the problems themselves, if not resolved, will stand as obstacles to the success of those negotiations.

In recognition of Professor Robert E. Hudec's scholarly contributions to international trade law, participants at the conference in his honor were invited to employ, in their treatment of the WTO problems they had chosen to discuss, a particular analytical approach for which Hudec's scholarship is known. Known to conference participants as “Transcending the Ostensible,” the approach directs particular attention to the possibility that WTO legal institutions, like other international legal institutions, will function in unexpected ways due to the political and economic conditions of the international environment in which they have been created, and in which they operate. Like all international legal institutions, WTO legal institutions are designed to affect the behavior of governments, rather than private persons and institutions. Government behavior is determined by the domestic political forces engaged on the issue in question.