ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the issue of how to think about institutional change in the context of legal development, using the World Trade Organization (WTO) as a primary case study. It shows how, in institutional terms, politics and law interact to create an international legal system. The chapter develops a method that examines external and internal drivers of change together, through a process termed shifting equilibria. It also examines key literature around the concept of punctuated equilibrium, which is the closest that political economy research has come to thinking about the process of change happening through shifts in the locus of institutional momentum. The chapter updates Robert Howse's observations by tracking the progress of shifting equilibria across 29 data points representing moments of multilateral political movement in the development of the trading system. It then examines the implications of a shifting equilibria pattern of institutional development for the legal evolution of the WTO.
