Center for Law & the Economy Workshop: Sannoy Das (Vanderbilt)

The Murphy Institute's Center for Law and the Economy hosts workshops each semester featuring Tulane and guest faculty from the fields of law, economics, and political science. Presenters share their latest research on a range of topics, including regulation, civil rights, the criminal legal system, and other key issues in law and political economy. Papers are distributed beforehand to the participants who read the paper and prepare discussion questions for the presenter.

The workshops, organized by Adam Feibelman, Director of the Center on Law and the Economy and Sumter D. Marks Professor of Law at Tulane Law School, are open to faculty, students, and the Tulane community. The Spring 2026 workshop series, co-convened by Associate Professor of Law and Murphy Affiliate Faculty Mateusz Grochowski, will focus on themes in consumer law, broadly construed.  

Sannoy Das writes about international trade law, and the history of international law. His work explores the relationship that international legal institutions bear with the history of economic and political philosophy. He received an interdisciplinary doctorate (S.J.D.) from Harvard Law School after writing a dissertation on the twentieth-century career of the "doux commerce" thesis: that commerce is a vector of peace. He is currently working to develop this dissertation into a book manuscript. Some of his other work in this vein has appeared (or is forthcoming) in the Yale Journal of International Law and the Virginia Journal of International Law. Other work, engaging critical scholarship on international trade and investment law, and critiques of the developmental state, have appeared in peer-edited law journals.

Abstract:
There is a widespread sense among international economic lawyers that the most-favored-nation obligation, as the expression of a nondiscrimination norm is fundamental for international trade law. But ought they adorn MFN with its normative halo? This article studies the historical emergence of the MFN-as-fundamental mythology. It shows that this mythology is the outcome of three controversial projects over the course of the twentieth century. Embedded historically, they reveal that much less than nondiscrimination, MFN has historically been the vector for drawing the boundaries across which discrimination operates, whether between imperial powers and colonies, or between the West and the East. It is only out of a relatively recent, and intellectually radical turn that MFN became synonymous with the very idea of a universalist, nondiscrimination-centric, international trade law. But that intellectual universe—ordoliberalism—now being past us, this Article what alternative norms might we consider for reorienting international trade law.