Offering a comprehensive approach to the study of NAFTA and its implications for the global trading system, this book covers the political and legal process of NAFTA approval as well as NAFTA's potential economic impact. Detailed analysis is given of NAFTA rule systems, dispute-settlement mechanisms and environmental implications. Perhaps above all, the book places NAFTA in the broader global multilateral trading system now to be embodied in the WTO. It examines the legal rules of the WTO designed to regulate the activities of regional integration arrangements, and considers the potential for conflict between the rules and trade policies of the WTO and those of NAFTA.