Second Lawsuit Challenging Trump’s New Section 301 Tariffs Filed

In my last post, I did a brief overview of the new lawsuit challenging Trump’s massive new Section 301 lawsuits filed by the Liberty Justice Center on behalf of two small businesses. LJC is the public interest law firm  I worked with on V.O.S. Selections v. Trump, the IEEPA tariff case decided by the Supreme Court in February. There is now a second lawsuit challenging the tariffs, Learning Resources, Inc. v. United States. Their complaint is available here.

This case was filed by a group of several businesses, with  Learning Resources, Inc., as the lead plaintiff. Learning Resources, which is a toy manufacturer, is the same firm whose case was consolidated with ours in the IEEPA litigation, and eventually gave its name to the Supreme Court decision. In that instance, their case was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds (it was, the justices decided, filed in the wrong court) and ours prevailed. In the present case, everyone agrees the only possible venue is the US Court of International Trade (CIT), where we filed our IEEPA case, and which also recently ruled against Trump’s Section 122 tariffs (in another case brought by LJC). Trump’s tariffs are making the CIT’s workload great again!

As in the IEEPA litigation, Learning Resources is represented by prominent appellate litigator Pratik Shah, and others at Akin Gump.

The issues raised in the Learning Resources complaint are very similar to those in the LJC case. They too argue that the Section 301 tariffs violate statutory requirements, and that if Section 301 did grant the president the power to impose these massive tariffs, it would violate the constitutional nondelegation doctrine. But, unlike the LJC complaint, this one does not invoke the major questions doctrine. It also does not seek a class action certification. Thus, relief granted by the court would likely be limited to the specific plaintiff firms.

I think it likely that CIT will consolidate these two cases and consider them together. There may well be more Section 301 cases filed by businesses, public interest groups, and possibly state governments. We shall see.