The president has invoked a long dormant section of law to hit one of America’s closest allies, a move that has troubled courts in the past.
To impose punishing tariffs around the world, President Trump has repeatedly turned to a series of decades-old, never-before-used trade powers, only to be slapped down by federal courts for overstepping the law.
But those past defeats have hardly deterred the president, who reprised that exact strategy this week to commence his new trade war against Canada — risking yet another round of costly legal wrangling for the White House.
This time, the uncertainty surrounds Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, a little-known authority that allows the president to impose duties in response to unreasonable and discriminatory trade practices. On Saturday, Mr. Trump invoked that statute to impose a 50 percent tax — the maximum allowed — on a small subset of Canadian imports, claiming that one of America’s closest allies had mistreated U.S. industries.
Before this weekend, no president appears to have issued tariffs under Section 338, so Mr. Trump’s actions quickly raised novel legal questions about a law that had otherwise sat dormant.
Over that time, Congress also adopted additional statutes that better defined the president’s ability to issue tariffs without explicit authorization from lawmakers. To some trade lawyers, that legislative history created doubt as to whether Section 338 had essentially been rendered obsolete.
The complicated legal factors only raised the possibility that the Trump administration could soon find itself in a familiar bind: forced to defend the president’s sweeping assertions of power before a federal court. So far, those battles have gone poorly for Mr. Trump, whose signature, so-called reciprocal tariffs were struck down by the Supreme Court in February.
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