Gabrielle at 154, rue de Lausanne: La Madonna or Mona Lisa of the International Rules-based Trading System?

At the beginning, there was confusion. The peoples of the world, those represented at the time in the GATT’s building Green Room, adjacent to the Director-General’s office and beyond, quarreled over how to put order in the informal international trading system. Eight years long, from Punta de l’Este, Uruguay (1986) to Geneva (1994) they discussed, until, at last, light prevailed over darkness. They avoided the Tower of Babel fate where the difference of languages brought confusion and ultimately destruction. Out of confusion at the end of the Uruguay Round instead, there came meeting of the mind, but it took time. As St. Augustin famously stated, “Light will more easily come out of error than out of confusion.” But a system, especially a legal system, needs not only rules but a coherent conceptual ordering. One man stood out, to provide the legal tools. It was John Jackson (1932-2015). As the first and foremost proponent of the General Agreement on Tariffs Trade (GATT 1947) as a legal framework and not just a commercial arrangement, as it had been indeed conceived back in 1947, he was best placed to develop the conceptual framework under which to analyze and nurture the new creature, the World Trade Organization (WTO). To accompany its birth, almost as a midwife, and later, its consolidation in legal terms, he left Ann Arbor to commute untiringly between Washington, Geneva, Brussels, public offices and academic meetings, shaping and spreading the new gospel. He has been rightly labelled as one of the chief architects of the WTO and its dispute settlement procedure. There had been however a precursor, although most of those living today have not had a chance to meet him. Like John the Baptist before the actual preaching of the New Testament by Jesus that person had been Robert (Bob) Hudec (1935-2003). The decisive role of these two American legal minds in establishing the basis of the international rule-based trading system, and convincing those in power in Washington that “it was good for America” must not be forgotten. The same must be said as to John’s influencing entire generations of students and scholars in the field. And here comes the Trinity, or, if one prefers, the Evangelists of the New Law, side by side with John Jackson, and following his steps. Not twelve of them but just three: Frieder Roessler, Ernest Ulrich (Ulli) Petersmann, and last, as to age only, Gabrielle. Frieder (1939-2024) had been the first lawyer in the GATT Secretariat, in 1973, since even before the times of Arthur Dunkel, the Director-General of GATT from 1980 to 1993, from the Tokyo Round Agreements to the dawn of the WTO, whose final text was largely based on his “Dunkel Draft”. Frieder’s hiring, as he wrote later, was accompanied by the skepticism of the staff (why would we need a lawyer?). I well remember when he welcomed me in the building when I first came as a young professor with a group of students from the University of Bergamo, where I was teaching at the time, in 1985, at the eve of the Uruguay Round. From head of the Legal Affairs Division of the GATT, which was created only in 1989, he went on, sailing trouble waters as he was calmly able to, becoming the first Director of the WTO Legal Affairs Division until 2001, where his legal (and diplomatic) role cannot be understated. Then there was Ulli. Initially, his principal home, besides at various universities, was predominantly the GATT building, where he also had started as an advisor in the early 1970s. A building that at the …