Antonello Tancredi

is a Professor of International Law at the University of Palermo School of Law. Research Project: “The Absence of Direct Effect of WTO Law in the European Community Legal System: a Matter of Institutional Balancing.”

Antonello Tancredi is a Full Professor of International Law at the School of Law of the University of Palermo.

He is scientific co-ordinator of the PhD Programme in EC Law, Department of Public Law, University of Palermo.

He holds a PhD in International Law from the “Federico II” University of Naples. Before joining the School of Law in Palermo, he worked at the University of Trento and “La Sapienza” in Rome. He was a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institut, Heidelberg, Germany several times.
His research interests cover public international law in general and its relationship to EU law.

Research Project

The Absence of direct effect of WTO law in the EU legal system: a matter of institutional balancing (and beyond)

The denial of direct effect to the WTO law in the EC legal system has been debated in an extensive literature. Relatively scant, however, has been the number of analyses focused on the institutional implications of the topic at issue here, as scholarly attention has been mainly concentrated on formal aspects (namely, the degree of precision, clarity or conditionality of the rules, and the room for negotiation left to the parties by the WTO dispute settlement system). His research will look at the pros and cons of the judicial deference shown in this field by the EC Courts through the prism of institutional balancing. The research will enable comparisons between different, but dialoguing, legal traditions, in order to shed light on similarities, differences, and cross-influences. This will be made also with a view to comparing the stand taken by the EC Courts with the position held by US Courts on this subject matter. Such a perspective is in line with the more general contention that as the European Union is now a forceful player in international relations, it has learned from the United States how to defend itself from the penetration of international law into its own legal order. The objective would be to publish the outcomes of this research as a Jean Monnet working paper, and as a part of a book-length project.