Speaker

 :

Professor Frank J. Garcia, Professor, of International and Comparative Law, Boston College Law School (BCLS Profile »)

Date

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Friday 3rd February 2012

Time

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1pm (with a sandwich lunch, sponsored by Cambridge University Press, from 12:30pm)

Venue

 : 

Finley Library, Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, 5 Cranmer Road, Cambridge 

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Frank J. Garcia is professor of international and comparative law at the Boston College Law School. His principal research interests include globalization; global justice; international trade; and the link between international trade law and global social issues such as development and human rights. He has recently co-edited Global Justice and International Economic Law (Cambridge 2011), and is the author of Trade, Inequality and Justice: Toward a Liberal Theory of Just Trade (Martinus Nijhoff 2003) and numerous book chapters, articles and essays. Professor Garcia is a member of the American Society of International Law, and serves as Book Review Editor and on the editorial board of the Journal of International Economic Law. A 1989 graduate of the Michigan Law School, Professor Garcia has taught and lectured at a variety of institutions in the United States and abroad, and currently directs the BCLS/Kings College London Program.

Lecture summary:
In order for free trade as a policy to deliver fully on its social promise, it must be both “free” and “trade.” In fact, it must be free, in the sense of voluntary, to be trade at all. In other words, for normative and practical reasons, free trade requires that global economic relations be structured through agreements which reflect the consent of those subject to them. The neoliberal trading system today only imperfectly lives up to this obligation. In this lecture, I will examine the role of consent in trade agreements, drawing on examples from the WTO and CAFTA as representative of important trends in multilateral and hemispheric integration systems. I will argue that an investigation into the nature of trade as a human experience reveals that many aspects of current trade law and policy mix what is ostensibly free trade with something else: exploitation, coercion or predation. This has normative implications for the justification of the neoliberal trading system, and practical implications for the analysis and structure of trade agreements and the stability and security of our foreign relations.

Audio

Approx. running time: 38 minutes

Lower bandwidth versions of this audio are also available at the University Streaming Media Service