Rule of Law Clinic Files Amicus Brief in Supreme Court Tariffs Case [View all]
October 27, 2025
A bipartisan group of former government officials who served in senior positions across eight presidential administrations filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to strike down President Trump’s invocation of emergency powers to impose sweeping tariffs, which they say are unlawful.
The former officials are represented by the Peter Gruber Rule of Law Clinic at Yale Law School and by Susman Godfrey LLP.
In the Oct. 24 brief, the officials, who have decades of combined experience in national security, foreign policy, and economic affairs, argue that the president has failed to meet the clear statutory requirements Congress imposed for invocations of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).
Read the amicus brief
Read an appendix to the amicus brief
According to the brief, to accept the use of IEEPA in this case would grant the president “standardless, unilateral tariff powers” that would “dangerously shift the constitutional balance between the legislative and executive branches” and invite precisely the kind of executive overreach the Constitution’s framers sought to prevent.
Officials who signed the amicus brief have addressed national emergencies at the highest levels of the U.S. government dating back to the Ford administration. Signatories include a former federal judge, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, two former ambassadors, a former White House counsel, two former State Department legal advisers, a former deputy secretary of state, a former acting attorney general, a former general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget, a former head of import administration at the Department of Commerce, and other former senior foreign policy and national security officials.
https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/rule-law-clinic-files-amicus-brief-supreme-court-tariffs-case
You can read the brief at the link.
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