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The Oxford Handbook of International Trade Law seeks to give an overview of international trade law and to present the trade regime in its political, institutional and legal context. The handbook is organized in five parts, covering respectively the evolution of the trading system, parts of the substantive law of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the WTO's dispute settlement system, the relationship between trade and other policy objectives ('linkage'), as well as the wider institutional and political context of the trading system. The editors largely succeed in their stated endeavour not to replicate existing work. While some of the chapters summarize or are based on already published material, many of them break new ground, such as Craig Forcese's chapter on the regulation of multinational corporations. Others present familiar debates in innovative and instructive ways--Daniel Bodansky's and Jessica Lawrence's chapter on trade and environment is particularly notable in this regard. Moreover, not only do the chapters present discussions of various aspects of trade law, but they also exemplify different ways of thinking about the trade regime and of approaching the study of the WTO. For example, both Andrew Lang and Joseph Weiler draw attention to the conceptual and cultural underpinnings of the trade regime and show how law and legal interpretations both shape and reflect the evolution of knowledge and broader value systems. In many respects the book thus represents an extremely rich resource.
Paradoxically, this very diversity of perspectives and the lack of uniformity in the way the authors approach their topics make it hard to see how the book could serve as a 'handbook'. While there are many legitimate conceptions of what a handbook should offer, most readers would certainly expect it to provide a guide to the most important concepts, issues and debates in a particular field. The chapters in this book fulfil this expectation to varying degrees. At one end of the spectrum, the TRIPS chapter by Andrew Mitchell and Tania Voon offers an almost textbook-style overview of major developments and outstanding issues regarding intellectual property protection. The TRIPS chapter is also one of the few chapters that provide an extensive bibliography as a guide to further reading. Similarly, David Gantz offers a succinct and well-structured...