Court of International Trade

The Court of International Trade will move forward with a challenge to President Trump’s termination of the de minimis duty-free entry program for Chinese shipments valued at $800 or less after it refused the Justice Department’s call to freeze the case during broader litigation over tariffs on China and other U.S. trading partners. CIT’s one-paragraph order -- issued late on June 5 as a simple docket entry in the de minimis case, without an opinion explaining the judges’ reasoning --...

The plaintiffs in two International Emergency Economic Powers Act tariff suits filed outside the Court of International Trade are asking appellate judges to “expedite” the cases for argument in September -- though the Justice Department is agreeing to that schedule in just one court while signaling it will oppose it in the other. California and a pair of education-technology companies filed motions to expedite the appeals of their respective tariff cases on June 4 and 5, respectively -- each saying...

Democratic attorneys general and small businesses challenging President Trump’s International Emergency Economic Powers Act tariffs say the White House has undermined its own claims that a decision overturning the duties poses a “disaster scenario” for trade negotiations, after key officials said the talks are continuing and they have other authorities to impose similar tariffs. Both sets of plaintiffs that won a landmark Court of International Trade decision rejecting the IEEPA tariffs last week filed new briefs on June 2 urging...

Judges on both the Court of International Trade and the federal district court for Washington, DC, are letting appellate courts decide whether to enforce their decisions holding President Trump’s International Emergency Economic Powers Act tariffs unlawful, pushing any clear resolution on that question to next week or later. Less than an hour apart on June 3, both the three-judge CIT panel that overturned the tariffs and Judge Rudolph Contreras, who authored a similar decision for the U.S. District Court for...

A federal judge in California has ruled that the state’s challenge to Trump administration tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act belongs in the Court of International Trade but is allowing California officials to immediately appeal her decision rather than sending the case to CIT, as the Justice Department preferred. “The question before the Court is not whether the challenged tariffs are constitutional; instead, the question is whether this action arises out of a law providing for tariffs such...

U.S. trading partners on Thursday reacted tentatively to a U.S. Court of International Trade decision – now stayed – to overturn many of President Trump’s tariffs, as officials, stakeholders and analysts suggested that litigation may not soon resolve questions about where Trump’s trade policy is headed. The CIT late Wednesday ruled that Trump overstepped his authority when he used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose tariffs on nearly all U.S. trading partners. The administration, arguing that the ruling...