ABSTRACT
National law reformers increasingly look to overseas models for guidance. States are also finding that their sovereign capacity to adjust their economic laws is constrained by the international conventions of which they are members. States are increasingly becoming law takers rather than law makers. This paper using intellectual property as a case study argues that global law reform processes hold real dangers for states. Sophisticated power elites can capture such processes and use them to tilt the playing field to their advantage as well as to extract economic rents. The story of how this was done in relation to intellectual property is told in detail.
