Chris ThomasChris Thomas

Email: C.A.Thomas@lse.ac.uk
Administrative support: Lucy Wright
Room: New Academic Building 6.03
Tel. 020-7955-7264

Chris Thomas joined LSE as a Lecturer in Law in 2011 and specialises in international economic law. He is a graduate of the University of Melbourne (LLB (Hons), BSc, and Dip Arts (English Lit)), where he was also co-Editor in Chief of the Melbourne Journal of International Law. Chris is soon to complete his PhD at the University of Cambridge, where he was supported by a WM Tapp Studentship in Law from Gonville and Caius College and was an Honorary Cambridge Commonwealth Trust Scholar. Before embarking on his PhD, Chris qualified as a solicitor in Australia and practised for three years with Mallesons Stephen Jaques in Melbourne.
 

Research interests

Current research interests include: the law of the WTO; the relationship between law and expert knowledge and authority; the basis of obligation in international law; the concept of international and transnational public spheres; and approaches to distributive justice in trade and investment agreements.

   

Teaching

Selected articles
and chapters in books		  

'Of Facts and Phantoms: Economics, Epistemic Legitimacy, and WTO Dispute Settlement' (2011) 14 (2) Journal of International Economic Law 295

World Trade Organization panels are regularly required to address specifically economic evidence and arguments when resolving disputes. Economic arguments provide the basic foundations for many disputes, and parties are proving increasingly willing to contest the facts underlying those arguments. Despite this, panels have often failed to engage satisfactorily with economic reasoning. The deficiencies in panels’ reasoning have been exacerbated by their refusal to seek information and advice from independent economic experts. This approach is neither necessary nor productive. It undermines the epistemic legitimacy of individual panel reports and the political legitimacy of the dispute settlement system more generally. More careful and rigorous panel engagement with economic evidence, as assisted by independent experts acting within appropriate limits, would go some way to reducing this legitimacy deficit while improving the accuracy and finality of the dispute settlement system.

click here for full text via OUP [ON CAMPUS]
click here for full text via OUP [OFF CAMPUS]

(with Carolyn Evans) 'Church–State Relations in the European Court of Human Rights' [2006] Brigham Young University Law Review 699-726

This article explores the ways in which the requirements of religious freedom in the ECHR permit certain types of relationships between Church and State (including some that would be impermissible in countries such as the United States) but also restricts the scope of permissible relations.

click here for full text via Hein Online [ON CAMPUS]
click here for full text via Hein Online [OFF CAMPUS]

Law Home Page