A Field of his Own: John Jackson and the Consolidation of International Economic Law as a Scholarly Domain

‘When I first became interested in GATT matters some years ago, I was struck by the intricate complexity of the law of that institution and the paucity of literature available to assist a person to learn about it. I needed a treatise that would have assisted me and I soon found that others shared my need. This work is a response to that need.’ In this characteristically understated manner, John Jackson prefaced his magisterial, seminal 1969 book, ‘ World Trade and the Law of GATT ’, 1 which served for many years as the main and most comprehensive source for students and scholars of the GATT (and indeed, nearly half a century later, it still makes for fascinating and useful reading, not merely for the sake of historical curiosity). Between these lines, one sees Jackson’s academic vision as it was borne out through his rich career and his prolific scholarship: international economic law (then, as now), an opaque area dominated by expert practitioners and object-oriented diplomats, is nevertheless also a distinct area of legal study, an academic discipline in its own right, worthy of its own teachings, its own unifying theories and spirited debates, its own rigorous research and its own scholarly community.