NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Raj Bhala, Brenneisen Distinguished Professor at KU Law, has made the latest edition of his trade law textbook available to the world on the Internet. The brand new, 6th edition of International Trade Law: A Comprehensive E-Textbook has just been published by the University of Kansas, School of Law, Wheat Law Library.
The new edition was published open access via KU ScholarWorks, KU’s online institutional repository of scholarly work by KU faculty, staff and students managed by KU Libraries. The new edition spans eight volumes over 188 chapters and more than 6,500 pages. There have been many changes in trade law since the publishing of Bhala's last edition of the textbook in 2019.
"In fact, one of the biggest changes is really the paradigm shift, the clear shift in the framework away from the presumption of free or freer trade and trade liberalization towards greater protection and even protectionism," Bhala said. "One of the reasons for that shift is the COVID pandemic and the experience of dependence on foreign countries, not all of which are friendly to the United States, for PPE, personal protective equipment. And then the development of the vaccine, principally in the United States, and the phenomenon of vaccine nationalism, of taking the position that, well, we have to make sure our population is protected first with the vaccine. So that combination of we don't want to be reliant for imports on critical, dare I say, national security items, here the security, the criticality being health, and we also don't want to lose control of the domestic supply in favor of just exportation worldwide of critical items has helped cause that paradigm shift away from free trade. So that's just one of the new developments that are captured in the new sixth edition of the eight volume trade textbook."
Bhala has been constantly at work updating the book.
"The additional writing went from about 4,300 pages to about 6,500 pages," Bhala said. "The writing also involved reorganizing the chapters and the volumes to clarify the material, make sure it's more user-friendly, and to analyze more deeply some of the issues that had been discussed, and then to deal with an array of new issues. Industrial policy, India's trade policy, the new sanctions against Iran, the completely new sanctions regime concerning Russia, just a few of the topics that were really quite brand new, and then some new theory, international relations theory, to help readers put in a big-picture conceptual framework all the shifts, and then revisiting some longstanding issues, the U.S.-China trade war, the steel and aluminum war, definitions of national security, and how we are defining and redefining that critical term. So it was a 24-7, 365 project, which I really love, because this textbook originated 32 years ago, and it has been very much the joyful centerpiece of my professional academic career."
One of the reasons to make this book open access is to take at least one obstacle away from prospective trade lawyers, no matter where they live.
"It breaks my heart when I hear students, and I do hear students from Kansas, from India, all over the world and all across America, say that they really want to go into international business law," Bhala said. "They want to take the international trade law course, but they cannot afford the cost of textbooks. Roughly, these are ballpark statistics, but over the last several years and made worse by the Russia-Ukraine War, the cost of printing books has gone up significantly. Many paper mills and printers have gone out of business. Here we have, at KU, the leader in open access among American public universities. I mean, the only universities in America that were in front of KU on getting materials open access were Harvard and MIT and Stanford's Graduate School of Education. Then back well over 20 years ago, our faculty passed an open access policy. Now, that said, we lawyers and law professors, and I am very much guilty of this, have been slow to take advantage of the open access period, the open access opportunity. And our textbooks and our treatises still tend to be by conventional paper-based publishers, sometimes offered in e-format, but for a fee, for a big fee. Well, we've all, as you know, we've all watched the mountain of student debt grow larger. As you very rightly point out, there is a problem of egalitarianism in the legal profession, and I see it in the international legal profession. It's really important that all the students who want to go into international trade law have the opportunity to do so, and that we don't add to their debt burden."
Bhala's hope is that this will inspire other textbook writers to make their materials open access, in an effort to make the best scholarship in the world available to those with the aptitude, without regard to the economic situation they come from.
Nick Gosnell's conversation with Bhala about the textbook and other trade law matters is available below.
Editor's Note: KU News Service's Michael Krings contributed information for this report.
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