My Mentor, Gabrielle Marceau

Like so many people working in the field of international trade law, I was blessed to be mentored in my “younger and more vulnerable years” by the incomparable Gabrielle Marceau. In fact, her mentorship began several years before we met: as a student competing in the ELSA Moot Court Competition on WTO (World Trade Organization) Law (EMC2) (as it was then known, now the John H Jackson Moot), Gabrielle was the authority most often consulted by my team-mates and me as we tried to make sense of the intricacies of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT 1994) and the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS Agreement). Her calm, clear, and rigorous exposition of panel and Appellate Body reports, and her creative explorations of how the WTO agreements might work together with other areas of public international law, were inspirational and, for us law students exhausted and confused by the sometimes overwhelming details and complexities of dispute settlement reports, enormously helpful. When my team was fortunate to argue in the Grand Final in Geneva in front of a large panel including Gabrielle, we were both awed to be in her presence and, in an unexpected way, comforted to be appearing in front of someone who had become, through her writing, both a guru and almost a friend. I began my career at the WTO as an intern in 2013. My first assignment was to assist Gabrielle in her work advising a panel in an ongoing dispute. I was immediately struck by her tremendous knowledge of the WTO Agreements and dispute settlement practice, both at a macro and a micro level. On any point she could instantly recall past panel or Appellate Body proceedings where relevant issues had come up, as though she had memorized the entire WTO Analytical Index. Without even consulting the “green book” she could compare and contrast the wording of different provisions across the WTO Agreements in both English and French. And I was deeply impressed by the way her deep technical knowledge of the WTO rules was illuminated by a profound understanding of both the WTO’s institutional history and the broader international law context in which WTO rules operate. She seemed to have read (and written about) everything regarding international dispute settlement, public international law, and areas as diverse as human rights, environmental protection, investment law, and labour law. You can imagine how intimidated I was when Gabrielle asked me, a 23-year-old barely a year out of my Master of Laws (LLM), to prepare legal research papers for her! In 2015 I collaborated with Gabrielle on a book called A History of Law and Lawyers in the GATT/WTO. Emerging from a conference held to celebrate 30 years of the Legal Affairs Division in the GATT/WTO, the book collected personal reflections from many of the founding mothers and fathers of the multilateral trading system, including, sadly, a significant number who have since passed away. The book was a labour of love for Gabrielle, who conducted numerous interviews herself, and whose encouragement (and perhaps occasional prodding) was responsible for securing the invaluable contributions of so many past and present GATT and WTO staff. Preparation of the book also involved significant archival research to trace changes in the structure of the GATT/WTO Secretariat over time. In this work Gabrielle was indefatigable, working with archivists and past staff to track down documents that would shed light on the development of the Secretariat from a small office on the periphery of the Palais des Nations in the late 1940s …