Three former senior trade officials, including the lawyer who wrote the original version of Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, have told the Court of International Trade (CIT) that the Trump administration’s Section 301 tariffs are illegal, arguing the White House has claimed powers the statute never conferred.
The amicus brief, filed on 10 September 2026 in Case 1:26-cv-03555-3JP, was submitted by Alan Wm. Wolff, Carla Hills, and Warren Maruyama. Between them, the three amici bring more than a century of combined experience in U.S. trade policy.
Who Filed the Brief and What It Says
Wolff directed the Treasury Department’s Office of Multilateral Trade Negotiations and served as general counsel for what is now the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) during the Nixon and Ford administrations. He played a leading role in drafting the Trade Act and wrote the original text of Section 301.
Hills served as USTR from 1989 to 1993 under President George H.W. Bush, with direct responsibility for Section 301 actions including oversight of the U.S.-Japan Semiconductor Agreements. Maruyama was a USTR lawyer during the Reagan administration and served as the office’s general counsel under President George W. Bush; he also helped draft the 1984 and 1988 trade laws.
A fourth amicus, Ed Gresser, who oversaw USTR’s economic research and trade data, also joined the consolidated cases, according to the Liberty Justice Center.
The brief’s core argument is that Section 301 ‘was enacted to address specific unfair trade practices by individual U.S. trading partners,’ not to authorise sweeping, economy-wide levies on virtually every major source of American imports. The Trump administration, the amici contend, is claiming ‘a sweeping power to impose broad, economy-wide tariffs untethered from the statute Congress enacted.’
The Section 301 Tariffs: Rates, Scope, and Procedure
USTR Jamieson Greer initiated 60 Section 301 forced-labour investigations on 12 March 2026. A White House presidential action records that proposed tariff rates of 10% or 12.5% were published in a Federal Register notice on 5 June 2026, with public hearings held on 7, 8, and 9 July 2026 and more than 1,600 written comments received from over 100 witnesses.
The tariffs took effect on 24 July 2026. The 60 targeted trading partners collectively accounted for more than 99% of U.S. imports in 2024, according to Duane Morris.
The stated justification is that those 60 economies have failed to ‘impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labour.’ Wolff, Hills, and Maruyama argue that the underlying findings do not specify how each target has fallen short or how the alleged failures burden U.S. commerce, as the statute requires, and that Greer has not explained why the chosen rates can be expected to remedy the problem.
By aggregating ‘dozens of separate investigations’ and applying ‘a novel standard that foreign countries have not in the judgment of the USTR met,’ the brief says, Greer ‘exceeds the limits established by Congress and upsets the constitutional allocation of trade powers.’
A Pattern of Executive Overreach
The amici position the Section 301 action as the third attempt by the Trump administration to concentrate tariff authority in the executive branch. Earlier this year the Supreme Court ruled that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a 1977 statute that does not mention import taxes, does not authorise tariffs. The administration then turned to Section 122 of the Trade Act, which the CIT found had been improperly invoked.
The timing sharpens the point. A Congressional Research Service analysis notes that the Section 122 tariff, which came into effect on 24 February 2026, carried a statutory 150-day limit and expired on 24 July 2026: precisely the date the Section 301 forced-labour tariffs took effect. The brief calls the Section 301 regime ‘a thinly disguised pretext for reimposing the President’s IEEPA tariffs under the guise of dealing with forced labor.’
Consolidated Challenges Head to Court on 30 September
The Section 301 tariffs are now being tested on multiple fronts. The Liberty Justice Center’s lawsuit, captioned Burlap and Barrel, Inc. and Collective Horology, LLC v. Greer, was filed on 24 July 2026. On 3 August 2026, the attorney generals of 25 states, co-led by Oregon, Arizona, and California, filed a separate complaint in the CIT alleging, among other things, that USTR violated Section 304 of the Trade Act by failing to negotiate with targeted countries before imposing tariffs and that the rates were imposed without adequate individual justification, according to International Trade & Supply Chain Insights.
A CIT scheduling order consolidated those cases alongside two coalitions of small-business importers. Oral argument in the consolidated In Re: Section 301 Forced Labor Cases is scheduled for 10:00 EDT on 30 September 2026 in the Ceremonial Courtroom of the CIT.
Subject to any onward appeal, the court’s ruling will determine whether the executive branch can deploy Section 301 as a general tariff power or whether Congress’s carefully bounded delegation remains enforceable. The Trade Act, the brief warns, ‘imposed clear substantive and procedural limits on each tariff authority’ it delegated; it is not credible that Congress ‘simultaneously conferred, by implication, an unlimited tariff power through Section 301 … without any indication in the statute or legislative history that it intended to do so.’
