Limits on state autonomy in regulating services trade: regional and international trade liberalization commitments and public morals

This thesis explores the scope of the autonomy of the states in regulating services trade in areas that concern their public morals and analyses whether the indeterminacy of the public morals exceptions in supranational trade regimes reveals fundamental flaws in the design of those regimes as they apply to trade in services with reference to their experiences with cross-border provision of online gambling services.<br/>This interplay and tension between the scope of autonomous areas of the states and organizations since World War II has received considerable scholarly attention. Most of the academic discourse consists of supporting claims for and critical analysis of the constitutionalisation of the supranational legal order and the goals of supranational constitutionalism which typically aim for universality of rules and coherence. The persistent diversity of public morals at the national level is among those national circumstances often perceived as a threat to the constitutionalisation project and thought of as discrediting the achievability of the constitutionalist ideal. On the other hand, proponents of legal pluralism often emphasize the importance of preserving public morals.<br/>This thesis finds that, in both the WTO and EU context even if national laws regarding public morals are incoherently pluralistic, it may be possible for supranational regimes to bridge the structural divide between international laws and national laws effectively by developing doctrinal rules and practices that enable them. The analysis based of the online gambling example shows that both organizations have been able to accommodate these divergences without undermining their treaty objectives, mostly owing to their effective judicial review mechanisms which are complemented by, more in the case of EU, other conflict resolution mechanisms be including dialogue and negotiation. Within this framework, this credits constitutional pluralism perspective appears as the appropriate choice both for descriptive and normative purposes.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral Thesis

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

King's College London

Year dc:date.issued

2014

Author dc:creator

• Akcali Gur, Berna

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Keller, Perry Neil
• Brownsword, Roger

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

oai:kclpure.kcl.ac.uk:studenttheses/49153f2c-a32e-4594-bfe3-268ce5f30a8f

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:kclpure.kcl.ac.uk:studenttheses/49153f2c-a32e-4594-bfe3-268ce5f30a8f