Between the Letter of the Law and the Demands of Politics: Judicial Balancing of Trade Authority within the WTO Cosette D. Creamer∗ Abstract The judicial bodies of the World Trade Organization (WTO) operate virtually free from direct government influence. Yet they are also politically savvy and at times conform their rulings to the preferences of member states. This article employs original measures of judg- ment outcomes and aggregate levels of government support for the WTO's dispute settlement bodies to identify the conditions under which they do so. It finds that dispute panels tend to signal less deference to governments' regulatory choices|asserting international authority over a vast range of policy areas|only when they enjoy relatively greater support among the membership as a whole. Yet panels are not purely political actors, as they are accountable to a higher judicial authority. This article finds further that the legal constraints imposed by precedent moderate the influence of political pressures on panel validation of trade mea- sures. In this way, panels simultaneously seek to maximize their support among their legal and their political audiences, thereby balancing greater legalism and predictability within the trade regime against continued flexibility for governments. ∗Visiting Assistant Professor, Boston University School of Law; Ph.D. candidate, Department of Government, Harvard University; J.D., Harvard Law School. Email:
[email protected]. For helpful comments and useful discussions, I would like to thank Beth Simmons, Dustin Tingley, Mark Wu, Gerald Neuman, Rachel Brewster, Sara B. Mitchell, Karen Alter, Mikael Rask Madsen, Anton Strezhnev, Joan Cho, Emily Clough, George Yin, Zuzanna Godzimirska, Todd Tucker, and participants in the University of Copenhagen's iCourts Centre research workshop and the American Society of International Law's Mid-Year Meeting Research Forum.