The $130 billion tariff refund fight

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The Daily Docket

A newsletter by Reuters and Westlaw

By Caitlin Tremblay

Good morning. Tariff-refund seekers are flocking to a little-known U.S. court with a big precedent. Plus, the 9th Circuit will hear an appeal of a landmark 2024 ruling that ordered the EPA to strengthen regulations for fluoride in drinking water; U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is set to testify before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee; and a top U.S. law school is offering its own student loans as a new borrowing cap looms. Is this giant star the stellar equivalent of Jimi Hendrix? Let's get going.

Tariff-refund seekers flock to a little-known U.S. court with big-case experience

REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

Importers are flooding the U.S. Court of International Trade with refund claims after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down President Trump's tariffs, triggering what could become one of the largest reimbursement efforts in U.S. trade history. Here's what to know:

Roughly 2,000 lawsuits, up from just 252 in 2024, have already been filed by companies ranging from FedEx and L'Oreal to small importers, all seeking a share of more than $130 billion in tariff refunds.
Plaintiffs in several cases want the court to designate their suits as "test cases," which would guide how refunds are calculated and applied across tens of thousands of potential claims.
Smaller importers are pressing Customs and Border Protection to create a simple, low‑cost refund process rather than requiring expensive individual lawsuits.
The court may follow a model used after a 1998 U.S. Supreme Court tax ruling, but the sheer scale of tariffs collected on 34 million shipments means further litigation and major logistical hurdles are likely. Read more about that here.

Followup: Yesterday I flagged U.S. Supreme Court arguments over whether illegal drug users should be barred from owning guns. Here's how those arguments went.

Coming up today

SCOTUS: The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in Hunter v. U.S. which centers on whether claims of ineffective counsel or sentences above the statutory maximum are the only two permissible exceptions to a general appeal waiver.
Health: The 9th Circuit will hear an appeal of a landmark 2024 ruling that ordered the EPA to strengthen regulations for fluoride in drinking water, saying the compound poses an unreasonable potential risk to children at levels that are currently typical nationwide. Read the decision.
Antitrust: Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation are set to face trial today over U.S. claims that the entertainment conglomerate dominated live event markets in ways that ‌hurt artists, venues and fans.
Banking: A court conference is scheduled today in the U.S. government's long-running criminal case accusing the Turkish state-owned lender Halkbank of fraud, money laundering and conspiracy to help Iran evade ‌American economic sanctions.
Government: U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is set to testify at an oversight hearing before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, her first appearance before Congress since two U.S. citizens were killed in Minneapolis in January.
Government: The chairs of the SEC and the CFTC are scheduled to make a joint appearance at a financial summit in D.C.

Court calendars are subject to last-minute docket changes.

More top news

Industry insight

The DOJ plans to abandon its appeals of court rulings that struck down executive orders by President Trump targeting four prominent law firms, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Greenberg Traurig's David Miller was tapped to be the CFTC's top enforcement official. Read more here.

"The political attack by the attorneys general on a carefully and rigorously prepared scientific publication should concern us all."

—An open letter from 28 co-authors of the federal judiciary's reference manual on scientific evidence. The letter accuses court officials of letting partisan politics shape its latest edition by yielding to demands by Republican state attorneys general to cut a climate change chapter. Read the letter.

$25,000

That's how much incoming students at the prestigious Washington University in St. Louis School of Law will be able to borrow each year, directly from the university, in a bid to address an impending cap on federal student loans. Read more here.

In the courts

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to the legality of a federal law that bars people with serious criminal convictions, including nonviolent felons, from owning firearms. The court also decided not to take up the issue of whether art generated by AI can be copyrighted under U.S. law, and declined to take up a challenge to MLB's antitrust shield.
Shareholders sued Apollo Global Management and its billionaire co-founders Leon Black and Marc Rowan in a proposed class action for ‌allegedly defrauding them for nearly five years about the private capital firm's business dealings with disgraced sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein.
The California Institute of Technology sued Zoom in Delaware federal court, accusing the tech company of infringing one of the university's patents covering videoconferencing technology. Read the complaint.
T-Mobile countersued Verizon, accusing its largest rival of engaging in "bait-and-switch" advertising to induce consumers to switch cellphone carriers.
Perplexity AI asked a federal judge to dismiss a series of claims in lawsuits brought against it by the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, arguing that its AI-powered search engine's responses to user queries do not violate the newspapers' rights. Read the filing.

Contact

Caitlin Tremblay

caitlin.tremblay@thomsonreuters.com

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