[… M]ore than fifty years after the Tribunal's final decision, the Trail Smelter arbitration has come to occupy a prominent but somewhat mysterious position in the legal canon. Although it is one of the best known and most frequently cited international decisions, and is regarded by many scholars as the fountainhead of modern international environmental law, it is more an object of reverence than a subject of analysis. All too often it is invoked as authority by scholars who pause only long enough to mention its name and the principle to which it is said to lend support before moving on. Although the potential dangers involved in overstating either the scope of application or overall significance of the Tribunal's decisions have been noted on numerous occasions, there has been less emphasis on the equally important concern that these passing references constitute reductionist accounts of a highly complex set of circumstances, and as such represent a series of lost opportunities to learn the lessons of Trail Smelter.

The numerous warnings about the misuse of Trail Smelter tend to focus on its invocation, […] as support for the existence of customary duties to avoid causing transboundary environmental damage and to make reparation for such damage should it occur. The applicable principle, referred to as the sic utere tuo standard (from the Latin maxim sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas: use your own property so as not to harm that of another), has been characterized as a description “of the other face of the coin of sovereignty” and can be seen as the fundamental building block of a system of international environmental protection.