Fulbright Symposium

Pioneering Australian law blogger (now retired) Kimberlee Weatherall has asked me to plug the 2009 Fulbright Symposium, in Canberra 24-25 August 2009, which goes by the title “US-Australia Free Trade Agreement: The Last 5 Years, the Next 5 Years”. Speakers include original negotiators (Stephen Deady, and I think Mark Vaile), academics and trade commentators; including Professors Mac Destler, Bryan Mercurio and Justin Hughes as well as a range of Australian faces – right across the subject areas. There’s a full list/program at http://www.law.uq.edu.au/fulbright-program.

2 thoughts on “Fulbright Symposium

  1. If ’twas me, I’d focus on the intellectual property clauses of the agreement. Whether US IP law is optimal within the US is one thing, whether it is optimal for a small economy that is always going to be a large net importer of IP is another. By signing up to US IP arrangements we’ve caused ourselves far more long-run damage than we’ve gained by selling a bit more beef to one particular country.

    Alternatively there’s the wider issue of easy-to-achieve but trade-diverting bilateral agreements versus hard-to-achieve but trade-increasing multilateral ones.

  2. Kim did a lot of the best work on IP at the time of the FTA, so I’m sure this issue won’t be ignored, DD.

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