Many prominent legal scholars and former government officials across the political spectrum have supported the lawsuit challenging Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs brought by the Liberty Justice Center and myself, and backed the recent US Court of International Trade decision in our favor. But the ruling does have its critics, and one of the most prominent is Harvard law Prof. Jack Goldsmith. He doesn't actually conclude the ruling is wrong. But he clearly has serious reservations about it, outlined in a notable article on the Executive Functions substack, where he also criticizes the recent US District Court of DC (DDC) ruling against the tariffs. In this post, I explain why those reservations are generally misplaced.
As the CIT opinion emphasized, the key factor behind the decision was the "unbounded" nature of the tariff authority claimed by Trump: "The question in the two cases before the court is whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 ("IEEPA") delegates…. to the President…. authority to impose unlimited tariffs on goods from nearly every country in the world." The CIT ruled IEEPA did not grant such limitless power, and that it would be an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power if it did.
