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
Well, based on the hairbrush case we talked about, it seems like you wouldn't have a functioning shoe here until you glued on that sole. Like, that's the step that would create a change in the name and use and character, right? Yes, right?
The name of this big boat shoes case was Uniroyal. And Larry says Uniroyal spread the idea that a substantial transformation involves more than just giving something a new name or character or use. You might have to change something's essence.
These days, you can build an entire laptop in China where most of the parts and labor come from China. But if the motherboard is from Vietnam, customs might say that laptop is actually Vietnamese because the essence of the laptop is in the motherboard.
Yes. And this sticky note situation happened back in 2020. This was shortly after Trump put a bunch of tariffs on products from China. And Staples, the office supply company, was trying to figure out what is the country of origin of our sticky notes? Like, do we have to pay the tariffs on China? Yeah.
And the decision that customs came to about where the sticky notes were last substantially transformed, it really threw us for a loop. So we asked Maureen Thorson to help us make sense of their logic.
Yeah, I'm going to go out on an obvious limb here and say that it seems like the essence of a sticky note is like the meeting of paper and glue. It's like the moment where the paper and the glue come together.
But customs did not see it that way. And partly they were thinking, well, is it that big of a deal to just cut up some paper and add glue to it? We should be focused on the more complicated step of actually making the paper. Because the paper is the essence of a sticky note.
And there is another way to do this. Whenever we sign individual free trade agreements with other countries, they will often insist on not using our weird, loosey-goosey substantial transformation test. For our free trade deal with Canada and Mexico, we had to agree on a new system with a whole compendium of extremely specific rules for determining a product's country of origin.
Depending on the product, the rules might have to do with how much labor came from a country, or the value of the parts that came from a country, or even whether a key chemical reaction happened in a given country.
But also, country of origin just didn't matter as much in the past. For decades, our tariffs treated most countries more or less the same. But recently, that has all started to change. Since April, Maureen's been on the phone with her clients at all hours trying to explain to them our weird and wacky system of determining country of origin.
Special thanks to Bill Reinsch, Robert Shapiro, and Damon Pike. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi.
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