People who have been following the Antigua/US internet gambling case won't find much new in the Times' recent wrap.  Antigua has won the case - its internet gambling sites are barred from the US, but domestic providers of online track wagers and lottery ticket sales are not, and that, the WTO tribunal has concluded, is a violation of the national treatment obligations in the GATS, which requires the US to treat foreign and domestic service providers in the same way.  The question now turns on the remedy, which raises interesting fundamentals of international law and international relations.  Will the US ignore its treaty obligations to tiny Antigua?  Will the WTO dare to impose a remedy that really hurts America?  These questions suggest that the dispute could turn on whether a country strong enough and interested enough to ignore a particular international legal obligation will do so.  And that is the sort of thing that realists - who are skeptical of international law - often think will happen.

But there's much more litigation that needs to occur before these questions are answered.  Still the Times's article is pretty good, not least because it offers Charlie Nesson, a professor who doesn't do much with trade, saying: 

“Think of this from the W.T.O.’s point of view,” said Charles R. Nesson, a professor at Harvard Law School. “They’re this fledgling organization dominated by a huge monster in the United States. People there must be scared out of their wits at the prospects of enforcing a ruling that would instantly galvanize public opinion in the United States against the W.T.O.”

A useful corrective to WTO specialists who like to think of their organization as all but all-powerful.

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