By ruling, on Friday, February 20, that Donald Trump could not rely on a 1977 law to impose tariffs on more than 100 countries, as he has done since April 2, 2025, the Supreme Court handed down a major decision that resonated worldwide. The justices reminded the government of the limits of its power. Under the US Constitution, the imposition of tariffs falls solely within the powers of Congress, and the cited law does not grant the president of the United States this authority.
Despite the apparent clarity of the outcome, the 164-page decision reveals deep fault lines, tempering the lessons that can be drawn from it. The significance of the Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump decision can be explained by both the stakes and the context. The imposition of tariffs has been a central lever in Trump’s foreign policy, which he presented as essential to the “survival” of the US. For the Court, this was the first review of a key element of the second Trump administration’s agenda. While the administration had largely prevailed before the Court up to this point, those were mainly decisions issued in emergency proceedings, in which the Court suspended the implementation of rulings unfavorable to the administration.
The Learning Resources case thus brought the Court face-to-face with the government’s maximalist actions and arguments. Here, the justices had to determine whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a law passed by Congress in 1977, authorized the president to impose tariffs unilaterally. The law states that if the president identifies “unusual and extraordinary” threats to national security, foreign policy or the economy and declares a national emergency, he then has powers allowing him, in particular, to “regulate (…) importation” of goods.
The justices confront Trump
By a vote of six to three, the Court has ruled that these tariffs are illegal. The opinion of the Court, which was written by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by two other conservative justices (Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, both of whom were appointed by Trump) and the three progressive justices (Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson), emphatically underscores the boundaries of the separation of powers. The core of the analysis rests on the meaning of the phrase “to regulate importation” of goods.
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