Trade law scholars have often argued that international institutions can serve a useful domestic political role by providing a constraint against domestic demands for protection. In this paper, I identify a new way in which such institutions and their particular features can be valuable to governments: namely, that they can provide useful information about domestic political groups. While governments are responsible for the administration of most legal trade-related actions, the information that governments need to determine which actions to pursue is often the private information of the firms and interest groups that are lobbying for these actions, and there are significant incentives for such groups to misrepresent this information. This paper uses a formal model to demonstrate that governments can use the multitude of legal options available to them to screen between domestic groups for those with the strongest cases; a selection process which can help to explain, amongst other things, why trade remedies tend to be structured around meeting criteria instead of as “efficient breaches” requiring compensation and why disputes pursued via the WTO have such a high rate of success (approximately 90% for cases that reach the panel stage).

贸易法学者经常争辩说，国际机构可以通过限制国内保护需求来发挥有益的国内政治作用。在本文中，我确定了一种新的方式，这些机构及其特殊功能对政府而言很有价值：即它们可以提供有关国内政治团体的有用信息。尽管政府负责与大多数与贸易有关的合法行为的管理，但政府确定采取哪种行为所需的信息通常是游说这些行为的公司和利益集团的私人信息，并且对这些行为有很大的激励作用。这样的团体曲解了这些信息。本文使用一种正式的模型来证明，政府可以利用其可用的多种法律选择权，在国内集团之间针对最强案件进行筛选。选择过程，除其他外，可以帮助解释为什么贸易救济倾向于围绕满足标准的结构而不是要求补偿的“有效违约”，以及通过WTO进行的争端取得如此高成功率的原因（约90％对于到达专家组阶段的案件）。