Abstract
The concept of legitimacy has many facets. The article reviews from a politics and law perspective the diagnosis of an “institution in crisis” and calls for a more rigorous assessment taking into account dominant philosophical conceptions on the optimal design and functioning of an international organization. This article is divided into three parts. It starts with a cautionary note on existing fallacies about assessing multilateral intergovernmental cooperation and discusses competing schools of thought that approach the WTO with varying perceptions of democracy and legitimacy. The second part of the article takes up the actual debate on re-designing the WTO and directs attention to the question of balancing input and output legitimacy. The third part discusses potential avenues of research that have been neglected in the past.