Maureen Thorson
speaker
31 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Maureen Thorson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And asking those questions is kind of her job, but not just because she's a poet. You see, Maureen also happens to be one of the top international trade lawyers in America. Sort of poet by night, trade lawyer by day.
As an international trade lawyer, Maureen helps companies navigate the complicated world of tariffs, a world that is also full of questions about what makes this this or that that.
For Maureen's clients, those questions matter now more than ever. On April 2nd, President Donald Trump announced his plan to put big new tariffs on dozens of countries. And we caught up with Maureen just a couple days later.
But figuring out something's country of origin is far from simple.
For example, imagine you take peanuts that were grown in China, ship them to a factory in Brazil and grind them into peanut butter. Is that peanut butter a product of China or has it become a product of Brazil?
And I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. Virtually everything that's imported into the United States, by law, must have a so-called country of origin, the place where it officially came from. And figuring out that country of origin matters because that's what customs goes by when it's enforcing tariffs.
So let's start with the rules for American products. When something says it's made in USA, that doesn't just mean that it's manufactured in the United States. It also means that virtually all of the parts and ingredients and labor came from the USA.
There are some exceptions for things like clothing and some types of meat. But basically, if an American product isn't 100% American, it cannot say made in the USA.
The rules are very different for products that are not American. Basically, anything that's imported has to be labeled with the main country it came from. It's so-called country of origin. That's been the law since 1890, when Congress wanted consumers to know where their imported products were coming from. So those labels that say product of China or product of France, they are not optional.
Maureen has helped companies import a lot of different products. She's not allowed to say exactly what she's worked on, but it's things like industrial engines and smartphones and also flowerpots. She helps companies figure out that product's country of origin, get it labeled right, and declare it to customs.
Now, we should say for many years, companies didn't think too, too hard about country of origin. Most of the time, what you labeled something or what you declared to customs didn't matter that much because for most countries, tariffs didn't really differ that much.
Other companies were trying to switch up their manufacturing so their products wouldn't count as made in China anymore. They're asking Maureen, how much can I bend the definition of made in China?
Word for word.
A new name, use, or character. That is the entire rule. And the way it works is, if you send something to, say, Vietnam, and there you change it enough that you're basically turning it into a new thing, you're giving it a new name, use, or character, then that thing now counts as a product of Vietnam. A new name, use, or character.
Larry says the origin of the substantial transformation test was this Supreme Court case from 1908 involving corks. A U.S. company was importing corks from Spain, cleaning them up a bit, stamping on a logo, and the Supreme Court said...
That is not a substantial transformation, because cleaning up the corks did not give them a new name, it didn't change how they were used, and it didn't really even change their character. They started out as corks, and they were still corks here in the U.S.
To tell the story of how the thinking around name, character, and use has evolved over the decades, we're going to walk through three examples. The first one is from the 1940s, and it involves hairbrushes.
That's going to be a big yes for me, Doug. Look, this thing's getting a new name, a character, and a new use. You can't just use some block of wood to brush your hair. Come on. Right.
But by the 1980s, manufacturing was getting way more complicated. You could argue that any step in the process changed a product's name, character, or use. So where would Quartz draw the line? All of this came to a head in a fight over... Boat shoes. That's coming up after the break.
Yeah, a smartphone might be made out of parts from dozens of countries, and those parts themselves are made up of other smaller parts from dozens of other countries, all of which makes the process of trying to figure out something's country of origin incredibly tricky.
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