Labor and Environmental Protection in Free Trade Agreements: A New Paradigm?

Edward Gresser (Democratic Leadership Council)

• Senior Fellow and Director, Trade and Global Markets Project, Democratic Leadership Council
• Mr. Gresser has worked at the Progressive Policy Institute, focusing on economic relations between the west and the Muslim world, East Asian integration and American trade relations with China, the U.S. tariff system and its effects on low-income families and least-developed countries, inter-American relations, competitiveness and worker adjustment, trends in American manufacturing, international finance and the relationship between trade, labor and environmental issues. He was Policy Advisor to U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky during the Clinton Administration, and was Legislative Assistant and Policy Director for Senator Max Baucus, where he was responsible for staff work on trade foreign policy.
• Mr. Gresser has published extensively and has been cited by the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the IMF.

John H. Knox (Wake Forest University School of Law)

• Professor of Law
• Professor Knox has advised the representative of the U.N. Secretary-General on human rights and corporations and has worked with the Center for International Environmental Law on the implications of climate change for the human rights of the Maldives.
• He has chaired a national advisory committee to EPA on the environmental organization created by NAFTA, the North American Commission for the Environmental Cooperation.
• Professor Knox has served as attorney-adviser at the Department of State, where he negotiated international agreements and litigated international disputes.
• Professor Knox specializes in international law of human rights, the environment and trade.
• He has published extensively.

Kevin Kolben (Rutgers Business School)

• Assistant Professor
• Professor Kolben was a senior associate with Human Rights First in its Workers Rights Department, focusing on corporate accountability and international labor regulation. His expertise includes international labor rights, human rights, and international trade law, and he has published extensively on those subjects. His recent work includes a path-breaking article on how to rethink U.S. labor policy in its trade agreements.

Howard Mann (International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD))

• Associate & Senior International Law Advisor
• Mr. Mann specializes in sustainable development law, focusing on international trade, investment and environmental law, and legal policy. He represented IISD in its precedent-setting intervention in the Methanex case, which first established that non-governmental organizations may participate as amici in investor-state disputes under NAFTA. Before becoming a consultant, Mr. Mann served as a lawyer for the Government of Canada, where he participated in the negotiation of several international environmental agreements, including the NAFTA environmental agreement. He currently advises government officials on international investment and sustainable development issues in many developing countries.

David L. Markell (Florida State University College of Law)

• Steven M. Goldstein Professor of Law
• Professor Markell served as the first director of the office within the Commission for Environmental Cooperation that considers citizen petitions, and has written extensively on that procedure. Together with Professor Knox, he co-authored Greening NAFTA, a review of the effectiveness of the NAFTA environmental agreement after ten years. Professor Markell has published widely on environmental and administrative law, and his scholarship has received several honors and awards.

Ian Taplin, Ph.D. (Wake Forest University) - Moderator

• Professor, Sociology, Management and International Studies, Wake Forest University
• Dr. Taplin has taught at the Bordeaux Ecole de Management, Bordeaux, France; Groupe Ecole Supérieure de Commerce, Toulouse, France; Employment Research Institute Napier University, Edinburgh Scotland; and Graduate School of Management, U.C. Irvine.
• Dr. Taplin has written extensively about international labor including the topics of global production, restructuring labor intensive industry, and the European and North American clothing industries.

Marley Weiss (The University of Maryland School of Law)

• Professor of Law
• Professor Weiss chaired the national advisory committee to the U.S. National Administrative Office for the NAFTA labor side agreement, and was recently appointed as the academic/neutral co-chair of the International Labor and Employment Law Committee of the ABA Section of Labor and Employment Law. Prior to becoming a professor, Professor Weiss was associate general counsel of the United Auto Workers. Professor Weiss has written widely on labor and employment law, including comparative and international labor and employment law, and specifically on the efficacy of the NAFTA labor agreement.

Chris Wold (Lewis and Clark Law School)

• Associate Professor of Law
• Director, International Environmental Law Project
• Prior to teaching at Lewis and Clark, Professor Wold was a staff attorney with the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) and the Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide-U.S. (E-LAW).
• Professor Wold is the co-author of the leading textbook on trade and environmental issues: Trade and Environment: Law and Policy. He is a member of the EPA national advisory committee on the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, and was the lead attorney on a submission to the Commission concerning the United States. He has recently proposed sweeping reforms to how the NAFTA model is used in current U.S. free trade agreements.