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"Comparative law is increasingly used as a tool in the making of law at national, regional and international levels. Private international law is now often affected by international conventions, and the issues faced by classical conflicts rules are frequently dealt with by substantive harmonisation of law under international auspices"--

ABSTRACT
The 2009 European Union (EU) Seal Regime banning the importation of seal products on moral grounds and the series of cases before the EU courts and World Trade Organization provide an opportunity to understand how capitalism relies on racial categories. The EU Seal Regime is racist since it constructs an Indigenous identity based on abstract European definitions of subsistence hunting. It also has a unique racializing dynamic that proports to protect Indigenous identity from afar but in effect decimates Indigenous communities in their homeland. In this struggle over seals and the trade laws that constitute the global seal market, the concept of sovereignty in this instance helps clarify what is at stake. What is at stake is a contest over who has jurisdiction over seal bodies: whoever has the power to create the market rules that determine the taking and selling of seals in effect determines the sovereign power in the Arctic. Ultimately, what is problematic with the Seal Regime is that the definition of European morals used to justify the ban of seal products relied on a relationship that simultaneously ignored and threatened Indigenous existence.

37 pages ; There is an emerging consensus that the WTO is in grave need of institutional redesign. For the last fifteen years, questions of WTO institutional reform have been framed as a matter of improving the WTO's legitimacy. This Article suggests that thinking about WTO redesign as a matter of improving its legitimacy limits our ability to fundamentally appreciate what the WTO's function and purpose is and conceptualize what it should be. It would be more useful to know what is exactly at stake and what have been the social, political, and economic implications of the legitimacy debate thus far. The legitimacy debate appears in discussions regarding constitutionalization, the dispute settlement system, and non-state actor participation and institutional transparency. The divisions between arguments in the legitimacy debate are usually understood to be between rule-based constitutionalization versus economic rights constitutionalization, sympathy versus skepticism regarding non-state actor participation, and support for a more legalized dispute-settlement system versus a more politicized dispute-settlement system. By reconstructing the legitimacy debate, the Article uncovers how what at first seem to be incongruent positions appear to be more related. Constitutional discourse draws from a desire to reduce politics in international trade and is a way of subordinating the state to markets or international institutions. Dispute settlement debates are a way to negotiate the relationship between the WTO and the state. Participation and transparency arguments derive from a shared empirical assumption that the WTO's power to govern globally is pervading everyday life and the state's power is waning.