Background

Debra Steger is a CIGI senior fellow and associate professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa, where she teaches and researches in the areas of international trade, international investment, governance of international organizations and dispute settlement.  She is the leader of the EDGE Network global economic governance projects, including a project on institutional reform of the WTO.  An architect of the World Trade Organization as a senior negotiator for Canada during the Uruguay Round, she was the founding director and first chief legal adviser to the WTO Appellate Body from 1995 to 2001.  She helped craft dispute settlement procedures and argued the historic first cases before binational panels under the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement and the NAFTA as general counsel of the Canadian International Trade Tribunal, and was recently chair of a WTO dispute settlement panel in a dispute between Mexico and the European Union. 

A prolific writer and commentator, professor Steger is the author of Peace Through Trade: Building the WTO (Cameron May Publishers 2004) and has been invited by Oxford University Press to author a book on the international regulation of the use of subsidies.  She is the editor of a new book, Redesigning the World Trade Organization for the 21^st Century (Wilfred Laurier University Press, the Centre for International Governance Innovation and International Development Research Centre, forthcoming 2009).