This is a work for practitioners – for diplomats, government officials and lawyers – who prepare and present cases to dispute settlement panels of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its Appellate Body, and for private practitioners who advise or represent governments and private clients with an interest in the outcomes of these proceedings. It grew from the experience of its authors, a private practitioner who has advised and represented governments and private parties under both the WTO and its predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and a former official of the Legal Affairs Division of both GATT and the WTO, who advised numerous panels.

The book attempts to address the kinds of procedural questions that confront practitioners in the very practical world of dispute settlement. While it relies heavily on panel and Appellate Body jurisprudence, it also describes the informal practices and WTO “ways of doing things” that have evolved, both to facilitate the dispute settlement process and to contend with the lacunae in the legal texts that time has exposed. From time to time we do comment critically on the decisions of panels and the Appellate Body, but this is not the focus of the book. Scholars increasingly are producing critical and analytical procedural literature, to which we refer at appropriate points in the text and list in the bibliography.