What is International Economic Law?

Abstract

This article attempts to define international economic law and its role in the international legal regime. After describing various options for the definition of international economic law, the article discusses the history of policy developments that led to the creation of international economic law as a field of legal scholarship. The article then discusses the role that various academics have played in the development of scholarship in this area and notes that international economic law garnered high popularity in the early 1980s because of a treatise written by Pieter VerLoren van Themaat. The article concludes by considering the relationship of international economic law to other fields of international law, such as environmental law and labor law.

Keywords: economic law, international trade, treaties, scholarship

JEL Classification: K33, N00, F00, F10