ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a qualitative account of how the acquisition and maintenance of expertise related to World Trade Organization (WTO) disputing affects perceptions of the legitimacy of the WTO among trade practitioners. It also provides an overview of scholarship about WTO legal capacity and its relationship to the credibility of the WTO system. The chapter delves deeper into legal authority and the perceptual bases of legitimacy claims. Private legal services and legal assistance from the Advisory Centre on WTO Law (ACWL) are alternative paths to mobilizing expertise for member states without in-house staff. The experiential basis of expertise, and the alternative modes of mobilizing it, thus serves to obscure the mitigating effects of market power and how serial participation by major players replicates inequalities in the practical ability to use the law. Finally the chapter examines practitioner accounts of the production of expertise and the central role of in-house experts in using the WTO system.
