Professor Powell, the former Chief Counsel for Import Administration and a founding NOAA Assistant General Counsel, is now Senior Lecturer in Law and Director of the International Trade Law Program at the University of Florida's Levin College of Law. Powell develops and teaches academic courses on international trade law for law and business students, conducts research on trade and business laws, and provides technical assistance to developing countries on implementing their WTO obligations. Professor Powell also serves as a WTO and NAFTA dispute settlement panelist. Prior to his teaching appointment in January 2000, Powell was for 17 years Chief Counsel for Import Administration in the U. S. Department of Commerce, the agency responsible for the trade laws providing relief against unfairly traded imports, the anti-dumping and countervailing duty laws. Steve also served for ten years as Assistant General Counsel for Enforcement and Litigation with the federal government's ocean research and conservation agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and as NOAA's Western Regional Counsel in Seattle. He began his legal career as a Captain with the U.S. Air Force Judge Advocate General. Professor Powell has over 30 years of experience in drafting and implementing U.S. trade and environmental laws, in litigating these laws and their international counterparts before federal courts and dispute settlement panels under the NAFTA and the WTO. Steve negotiated a number of treaties and executive agreements to discipline government subsidization and unfair private pricing practices, including the North American Free Trade Agreemen. He served as lead U.S. negotiator in Free Trade Area of the Americas talks on subsidies and dumping. Powell has centered his academic scholarship and teaching on international trade law's linkages with labor, environmental, and other human rights laws, culminating in his recently-released book, JUST TRADE: A NEW COVENANT LINKING TRADE AND HUMAN RIGHTS (written with his good friend and international law expert, Berta Hernandez Truyol). The book reflects the combined wisdom of experts in both trade law and human rights law to propose concrete measures to use trade's enormous power to enhance human well-being along with world economic welfare.
Articles
Beyond Labor Rights: Which Core Human Rights Must Regional Trade Agreements Protect? (with Trisha Low), Richmond Journal of Global Law and Business (2012)
As WTO Members relentlessly pursue new regional trade agreements to achieve even faster economic growth...
IS THE WTO QUIETLY FADING AWAY? THE NEW REGIONALISM AND GLOBAL TRADE RULES (with Trisha Low), Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy (2011)
While scholars and governments alike view the liberalization of international trade as a positive development,...
GLOBAL LAWS, LOCAL LIVES: IMPACT OF THE NEW REGIONALISM ON HUMAN RIGHTS COMPLIANCE (with Patricia Camino Pérez), Buffalo Human Rights Law Review (2011)
Continuation of the brisk pace of international economic growth with its necessarily increased use of...
Managing the rule of law in the Americas: an empirical portrait of the effects of 15 years of WTO, MERCOSUL, and NAFTA dispute resolution on civil society in Latin America (with Ludmila Mendonça Lopes Ribeiro), University of Miami Inter-American Law Review (2011)
The objective of this article is to analyze the effect of World Trade Organization (WTO),...
EXPANDING THE NAFTA CHAPTER 19 DISPUTE SETTLEMENT SYSTEM: A WAY TO DECLAW TRADE REMEDY LAWS IN A FREE TRADE AREA OF THE AMERICAS?, Law and Business Review of the Americas (2010)
Chapter 19 of the NAFTA transfers judicial review of U.S., Canadian, and Mexican government investigations...
Books
Just Trade: A New Covenant Linking Trade and Human Rights (with Berta E. Hernandez-Truyol) (2009)
While modern trade law and human rights law constitute two of the most active spheres...