The legal war over President Trump’s tariffs is far from finished.
A little more than a year after Mr. Trump rolled out an initial slate of punishing yet illegal duties, his administration is set to return to court on Friday to defend the new 10 percent tax that the president has imposed on most imports.
Mr. Trump announced the wide-ranging tariffs in late February, hours after the Supreme Court struck down the original, country-by-country rates that had served as the bedrock of his global trade war. To apply the new duties, he turned to a little-known provision of a roughly half-century-old federal law, which no president before him had ever actually used.
The result has been a familiar legal drama that may once again shape, if not curtail, Mr. Trump’s tariff powers. The president and his aides have insisted that their actions are legal, as they double down on a strategy that increasingly appears to be raising prices for U.S. consumers and businesses. But state leaders and small businesses have claimed Mr. Trump overstepped, arguing in two lawsuits that the president wrongly bypassed Congress.
The final say belongs to a panel of judges on the Court of International Trade, the same specialized circuit that handed Mr. Trump the first in a series of defeats that would upend his initial roster of tariffs. But the administration has projected a sense of optimism that its updated approach is legally sound, as it seeks to avert another recalibration of its trade strategy.
Ahead of the hearing on Friday, Timothy C. Brightbill, a trade lawyer for the Washington law firm Wiley Rein, said he expected the court to be “skeptical of President Trump’s ability to impose broad tariffs,” including his global 10 percent rate.
But Mr. Brightbill also acknowledged that it could be months before the legal system can render a full verdict on Mr. Trump’s policies, all while the administration works to formalize a set of replacement rates due later this year.