With these words, Associate Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis gave voice to the pioneers introducing transparency into the American legal system. His metaphor of sunlight and its ‘disinfectant’ benefits has been cited extensively in domestic law in favour of transparency policies and their potential advantages. Recently, Mavroidis and Wolfe have applied this image in the context of the World Trade Organization (WTO), noting that ‘transparency contributes more to social order than does coercion’ and that ‘[t]ransparency ought to improve the operation of the trading system by allowing verification by all Members that national law, policy, and implementation achieve the objective intended by the agreements’.