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The concept of precedent is fundamental to domestic courts, especially in Anglo-American common law systems, where judges are bound to the court's past decisions. By contrast, precedent has no formal authority in international law. Legal scholars point to Article 59 of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) Statute in this respect, according to which international legal rulings are binding only on the parties in the dispute at hand, and have no bearing on matters outside of the case.

AbstractHow does international law affect state behavior? Existing models addressing this issue rest on individual preferences and voter behavior, yet these assumptions are rarely questioned. Do citizens truly react to their governments being taken to court over purported violations? I propose a novel approach to test the premise behind models of international treaty-making, using web-search data. Such data are widely used in epidemiology; in this article I claim that they are also well suited to applications in political economy. Web searches provide a unique proxy for a fundamental political activity that we otherwise have little sense of: information seeking. Information seeking by constituents can be usefully examined as an instance of political mobilization. Applying web-search data to international trade disputes, I provide evidence for the belief that US citizens are concerned about their country being branded a violator of international law, even when they have no direct material stake in the case at hand. This article constitutes a first attempt at utilizing web-search data to test the building blocks of political economy theory.

There is considerable variation in the depth of countries' commitments at the World Trade Organization (WTO). While WTO members apply tariffs on imports at roughly comparable levels, the maximum levels allowed on these tariffs vary dramatically, leaving some members with far more flexibility to raise trade barriers overnight. Some countries have argued that such "binding overhang" is harmless unless it is exploited, while other countries disagree. This paper is the first attempt to empirically assess the effect of binding overhang on trade flows. I argue that the mere existence of binding overhang has a strongly negative effect on trade, through the way in which it muddles expectations. Using data at the 4-digit harmonized system product level, covering the WTO membership from 1995 to 2008, I demonstrate that the cost in terms of lost trade resulting from the ability to legally raise a tariff by one point is tantamount to nearly half the cost of having done so. In sum, WTO membership is, by itself, no panacea. Negotiating greater tariff flexibility can water down a country's legal commitments and significantly reduce the benefits flowing from the institution. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractThird parties complicate World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement by adding voices and issues to a dispute. However, complainants can limit third parties by filing cases under Article XXIII of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), rather than Article XXII. We argue that third parties create "insurance" by lowering the benefit of winning and the cost of losing a dispute. We construct a formal model in which third parties make settlement less likely. The weaker the complainant's case, the more likely the complainant is to promote third party participation and to settle. Article XXII cases are therefore more likely to settle, controlling for the realized number of third parties, and a complainant who files under Article XXIII is more likely to win a ruling and less likely to see that ruling appealed by the defendant. We provide empirical support using WTO disputes from 1995 to 2011.