Section 301's Own Architect Tells Court Trump Tariffs Are Illegal

A group of former senior U.S. trade officials, including one of the architects of the 1974 law the Trump administration has used to justify its latest round of global tariffs, has told a federal court the tariffs are unlawful. Ambassador Alan Wm. Wolff, who helped draft the original language of Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 as a government trade lawyer, joined former U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills and former Reagan-era USTR general counsel Warren Maruyama in a friend-of-the-court brief backing a lawsuit against the tariffs, according to the Liberty Justice Center, the public-interest law firm representing the plaintiffs.

The case, Burlap and Barrel, Inc. v. United States, was filed in the U.S. Court of International Trade on behalf of a New York spice importer and a watch company, and argues the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative never satisfied the procedural requirements Congress attached to Section 301 before tariffs may be imposed. The complaint, filed in July, contends the administration is using a narrow tool meant to punish specific unfair trade practices by individual countries to impose sweeping tariffs on roughly 60 economies at once, based on forced-labor allegations the plaintiffs call factually unsupported. The Court of International Trade is scheduled to hear arguments on September 30.

The challenge follows a February ruling in which the Supreme Court found the administration lacked authority to impose tariffs under emergency economic powers, prompting officials to pivot to Section 301 as their new legal basis. Wolff and his co-authors argue in their amicus brief that Congress never intended Section 301 to function as a general tariff power, and that the investigations underlying the new tariffs were inadequate to meet the statute's requirements. "The tariffs should be set aside as contrary to law and arbitrary and capricious," the brief argues, according to CNN, which first reported Wolff's involvement. A ruling against the administration would mark the second time in seven months that a court has rejected the legal underpinning of Trump's global tariff program, though the government is expected to appeal any adverse decision.

Section 301 has historically been used narrowly, most often to justify tariffs on a single trading partner found to have engaged in a specific unfair practice, such as intellectual-property theft or market-access restrictions, after a formal USTR investigation into that country. The Trump administration's current tariffs instead apply broadly across dozens of economies at once, a structure the plaintiffs argue Congress never authorized under the statute regardless of the underlying justification offered by USTR. The administration adopted the Section 301 approach after the Supreme Court's February ruling, which found the president lacked authority to impose tariffs by invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, forcing officials to search for an alternative legal basis for duties that had already reshaped import prices across numerous consumer and industrial categories.

The Liberty Justice Center, which also brought the earlier IEEPA case that reached the Supreme Court, represents Burlap & Barrel, a New York-based importer of spices and seasonings, and Collective Horology, a watch retailer, both of which say the new tariffs have raised their costs significantly. The Court of International Trade's ruling, whenever it comes, is expected to be appealed by whichever side loses, potentially setting up a third Supreme Court tariff dispute within a matter of months.