Mona Paulsen

Collating my work on trade security to pin this on Twitter. Check out the readings below! Thanks so much.

@scottlincicome Hopefully you refer to Greer and not me!

Written by a serial philanderer.

What matters now is how many other governments find ways to pool their resources and collective interests to navigate China's export-led approaches and the United States' unilateral actions.

I believe trade security will worsen as the US increasingly demands that its market access be bought and paid for by its partners and the third country.

Multilateralism will be necessary if the US continues to engage in overlapping plurilateral channels. There are merits to maintaining constellations of dialogues, while recognising that procedural multilateralism offers more gains than costs for producers & consumers around the🌍

Frankly, all that can be done is to continue the work necessary to improve the system and to push for compromises and concessions that might one day persuade the US to reconsider multilateral approaches.

I began by considering how many specific claims here are misdirections or oversimplifications. But ultimately, this is the Dear John letter. ustr.gov/about/policy-o…

@Dschwarcz The question is what this means for those who may lack the legal reasoning skills to go in and see these LLMs as substitution.

Important questions remain, including whether sustained reliance on AI could erode legal reasoning over time. But these results push back against the common assumption that short-term AI use undermines independent thinking.

🚨 New Paper Alert 🚨 Perhaps the most pressing question facing the legal community is how AI affects human legal reasoning. Our new co-authored draft provides the first empirical evidence directly addressing that question. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

Though I appreciate and understand the context in which a panel said otherwise, if WTO Members ever amend the security exceptions, I find it imperative that they clarify that, in fact, it should matter whether a Member contributed to the situation necessitating security measures.

@ericadyork What I would call law office history.

“Cass calls himself an economist, but he was trained as a lawyer. Economists (and other social scientists) are interested in the best evidence. Cass, like a skilled litigator, is interested in the best evidence that strengthens the case he has already decided to argue. Cass uses evidence not because he is interested in getting closer to the truth, as a strategy for finding effective policy solutions; he uses it to advance his perspective, unmoored though it may be to the best evidence and unhelpful though it may be to the people for whom he claims to advocate.”

@DanielDiMartino Ok. Look, I think these kinds of attacks are unnecessary. You should welcome the opportunity to engage with other research and perspectives. In my area you need a strong background in the economics of trade and policy.

I am calling for a complete and total shutdown of lawyers claiming to be economists or know anything about economics.

The US has not completely abandoned law. It continues to expect other partners to respect its rules. But my worry is they may be sorely wrong to believe that reciprocity doesn’t also mean that trading partners will not respect trade rules either.

As soon as we cease questioning the extraordinary expansion of the rationale behind the section 232 tariffs, the line between so-called strategic goods with military potential that justify government control and regular everyday economic competitiveness, dissolves.

The rationale for these maximal tariffs? "A self-sufficient domestic manufacturing and industrial base for pharmaceutical products is vital for the ability to support national defense requirements and maintain public health security during a national emergency or wartime."

@jbsteinberg I think this is quite a generalised statement that is unnecessary. If you despise others who generalise about economists why would you turn around and do the same to another profession? We would all benefit from engaging with one another.

Lawyers should just stop meddling in economic policy entirely. More than any other profession (except maybe union bosses), they default to seeing commerce as zero-sum combat rather than mutually beneficial trade.

I look forward to abusing quotes about the Trump admin extolling the virtues of MFN. edition.cnn.com/2026/04/02/pol…