Meredith Kolsky Lewis goes global and tackles international economic law

More than 100 speakers representing every inhabited continent. Over 300 attendees. At least 40 countries represented.

In numbers and in purpose, the Society of International Economic Law (SIEL) conference held in July in Bern, Switzerland, was a truly global gathering. And it was, says Associate Professor Meredith Kolsky Lewis, who co-chaired the conference, “the culmination of many months of work and thousands of emails.”

Lewis is a founding member and co-executive vice president of SIEL, which she says was formed in 2007 when a group of international economic law (IEL) academics and practitioners determined that the IEL discipline merited its own free-standing society, rather than only operating in interest groups within the confines of broader international law societies. “We see ourselves as an umbrella organization that works with IEL interest groups and networks worldwide. We’re trying to facilitate linkages amongst IEL scholars and practitioners, especially those who have traditionally been under-represented in the discipline,” Lewis says.

At the biennial conference – this was SIEL’s fourth – speakers addressed topics in international trade; investment; international financial and monetary law; development; and international intellectual property, including subjects relating to the World Trade Organization, free trade agreements, international investment agreements, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

The three-day conference, held at the World Trade Institute at the University of Bern, featured three keynote speakers: Professor Michael Trebilcock of the University of Toronto spoke about trade and development; South African professor and arbitrator David Unterhalter, a former member of the WTO’s appellate body, discussed whether legal reasoning is distinct from economic reasoning in WTO law; and Eva Hüpkes, a member of the international Financial Stability Board, speaking about financial regulation.

Lewis says SIEL strives, through low fees and targeted financial assistance, to enable participation from developing countries, as well as by emerging scholars and Ph.D. students. “We want the conference to be accessible to the entire field,” she says.

“Although it was a lot of work, it was a wonderful event.  In addition to reconnecting with colleagues from around the globe, I came away with many ideas to incorporate into my current research.”

The Bern conference was the third in a row this summer for Lewis. She spoke in May at La Sapienza, University of Rome, at a conference called “The Political Economy of International Law.” Her address, which dealt with political economy in the context of compliance with international law, was based on the classical game theory problem, the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Lewis says she will develop the address into a chapter for a book the conference organizer is editing.

And in June she was in Taipei for the annual conference of the Asia WTO Research Network, of which she is a member. Her talk, “Early Harvests, Variable Geometry and the Single Undertaking,” “critiqued the current debate over how best to structure WTO negotiations.”

Coming up, in September Lewis will present a paper, “Implications of Plurilateral Trade Agreements and Mega-FTAs for the WTO,” at an International Economic Law Works-in-Progress Workshop to be held at the University of Western Ontario.  The event will be jointly hosted by UWO’s Canada-U.S. Law Institute and by SUNY Buffalo Law School’s Canada-U.S. Legal Studies Center, which Lewis directs.

At the end of the semester she heads to Japan to speak about the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement at a symposium at the University of Tokyo.  Finally, Lewis is offering a bridge-term course called International Economic Law in Context that will take SUNY Buffalo Law students to Wellington, New Zealand. Lewis maintains an appointment at the Victoria University of Wellington Law School, where she was based before joining the Buffalo faculty in 2013.