Lesson Plan: The Zipper Case

A teaching companion to the Time Rhymes story on the 1971 Nixon import surcharge, the Yoshida International v. United States litigation, the post-Yoshida statutory architecture (Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977), and the May 2026 Court of International Trade ruling against the Trump administration's Section 122 tariffs. Designed for upper-secondary or first-year undergraduate use in a course on US constitutional history, international trade law, or contemporary American politics.

Learning objectives

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

1. Reconstruct the chronology of the Nixon Shock of 15 August 1971, including its three components (closure of the gold window, the 90-day wage and price freeze, and the 10 percent import surcharge).

1. Explain the legal question raised by Yoshida International v. United States, the differing rulings of the Customs Court (1974) and the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals (1975), and the precise warning the appellate court attached to its narrow reversal.

1. Describe the statutory architecture Congress built in response to Yoshida (Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 and IEEPA in 1977), and explain why each piece was scoped the way it was.

1. Compare the 1971 Nixon surcharge with the Trump administration's IEEPA tariffs of April 2025 and Section 122 tariffs of 2026, and evaluate whether the post-Yoshida architecture is doing what Congress intended.

Section 1: The Camp David weekend

On Friday 13 August 1971, President Nixon helicoptered out of Washington with his senior economic team to Camp David. The retreat was kept strictly secret. Over three days the team produced what became known as the Nixon Shock: closure of the gold window (suspending convertibility of the dollar to gold at the Bretton Woods rate of 35 dollars per ounce), a 90-day wage and price freeze (the first peacetime wage controls in American history), and a 10 percent surcharge on every dutiable import. Nixon announced all three on national television at 9 p.m. Eastern on Sunday 15 August 1971.

Discussion:

• Why was the surcharge bundled with the gold window closure? What was the negotiating logic? Read the contemporary Federal Reserve History essay on Nixon's August 1971 announcement.

• The economist Robert Hormats argued that the surcharge be used as "a lever only for securing appropriate currency revaluations." How does this framing differ from a tariff intended to be permanent? What does it imply about the appropriate duration of an emergency tariff?

• Treasury Secretary John Connally famously told European finance ministers in Rome in late 1971 that "the dollar is our currency, but it is your problem." What was Connally's diplomatic strategy? What does his quote tell you about the United States' bargaining position in late Bretton Woods?

Section 2: Tokyo, Rome, and the Smithsonian Agreement

When the Nixon Shock was announced, the foreign exchange and equity markets reacted immediately. The Tokyo Stock Exchange's Nikkei 225 lost 7.68 percent on its first trading day after the announcement (16 August 1971). The Bank of Japan spent the next two weeks buying up dollars to defend the 360-yen-to-the-dollar Bretton Woods peg, accumulating approximately four billion dollars in reserves before letting the yen float on 28 August 1971. By December the major industrial powers had reached the Smithsonian Agreement at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington (concluded 17–18 December 1971), revaluing their currencies upward against the dollar. Two days later Nixon announced the surcharge would be lifted. It had lasted just over four months.

Discussion:

• How did the surcharge function as leverage in the December negotiations? What does the four-month duration tell you about the kind of emergency tariff power Nixon believed he had?

• Compare the Bank of Japan's position in August 1971 with the position of central banks confronting an asymmetric American dollar policy in 2026. What is similar? What is different?

• The Smithsonian Agreement is sometimes treated as the formal end of Bretton Woods, even though it preserved a fixed-rate system for another fifteen months until the dollar's float in March 1973. What is the right unit of analysis for the end of Bretton Woods: the August 1971 announcement, the December 1971 agreement, or the March 1973 float?

Section 3: The Yoshida case

Yoshida Kogyo K.K. (better known as YKK), a Japanese zipper manufacturer, imported zippers through the port of New York on 17, 25, and 26 August 1971 and paid the 10 percent surcharge under Presidential Proclamation 4074. Yoshida sued. The Customs Court ruled for Yoshida in 1974, holding that Proclamation 4074 had exceeded the president's delegated powers under the Trading With the Enemy Act of 1917, because the word "regulate" in TWEA did not encompass the power to set tariffs. The government appealed. On 6 November 1975 the United States Court of Customs and Patent Appeals (Chief Judge Howard Markey writing) reversed and upheld the surcharge, but did so narrowly. The CCPA wrote: "To uphold the specific surcharge imposed by Proclamation 4074 is not to approve in advance any future surcharge of a different nature, or any surcharge differently applied or any surcharge not reasonably related to the emergency declared."

Discussion:

• Read the lower court's 1974 opinion (378 F.Supp. 1155) and the appellate opinion (526 F.2d 560). What is the doctrinal difference between the two readings of "regulate" in TWEA? Which is more consistent with the canons of statutory interpretation?

• The CCPA's "different nature" sentence has been called the most consequential limitation on tariff law in modern American jurisprudence. What does each clause limit (different nature, different magnitude, different duration)? What kinds of future tariff exercise does it permit?

• The doctrine of constitutional avoidance: the CCPA explicitly noted that an unlimited reading of "regulate" would raise serious constitutional questions about the non-delegation doctrine. Read Justice Scalia's discussion of non-delegation in Whitman v. American Trucking (2001) and Chief Justice Roberts's discussion in Gundy v. United States (2019). How has the doctrine evolved?

Section 4: The post-Yoshida statutory architecture

Congress was already legislating during the Yoshida appeal. The Trade Act of 1974 (signed by President Ford on 3 January 1975) included Section 122, authorising the president to impose a balance-of-payments tariff capped at 15 percent and at 150 days, only when a real balance-of-payments deficit could be demonstrated. Three years later, Congress replaced the peacetime emergency provisions of TWEA with the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (signed by President Carter on 28 December 1977). IEEPA was deliberately scoped to sanctions, asset freezes, and embargoes, not to tariffs.

Discussion:

• Compare the legislative history of Section 122 with that of IEEPA. What were the principal congressional concerns motivating each statute? Read the relevant Congressional Research Service reports and committee reports from 1973–74 and 1977.

• Why did Congress not authorise a peacetime tariff power in IEEPA? What had changed in the legislative consensus between 1974 (when Section 122 was capped at 15 percent / 150 days) and 1977 (when IEEPA omitted tariff authority entirely)?

• Counterfactual: if the CCPA had affirmed the lower court in 1975 and held that the 1971 surcharge was illegal, would Congress have written Section 122 at all? Would IEEPA have been written more permissively?

Section 5: The Trump tariffs and the courts

On 2 April 2025, President Trump invoked IEEPA to impose a 10 percent surcharge on every dutiable import from nearly every country, with higher "reciprocal" rates added for designated trading partners. Two small importers sued: V.O.S. Selections (a New York wine merchant) in April 2025 and Learning Resources (an Illinois educational-toy company) shortly after. On 20 February 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that IEEPA does not authorise tariffs (Chief Justice Roberts writing the majority opinion, joined by Sotomayor, Kagan, Gorsuch, Barrett, and Jackson; Thomas, Kavanaugh, and Alito dissenting). The Federal Circuit issued its mandate in V.O.S. Selections in March 2026, opening the door to roughly 175 billion dollars in tariff refunds.

The administration tried again. It cited Section 122. Same 10 percent. On 7 May 2026, the United States Court of International Trade ruled 2-1 against the Section 122 tariff, holding that the "balance-of-payments deficit" the statute covers is the kind that existed under the Bretton Woods fixed-exchange-rate system that ended in 1973, not the structural trade gaps of 2026. The administration is preparing to refund a further 166 billion dollars plus interest.

Discussion:

• Read the Roberts opinion in Learning Resources alongside the Yoshida CCPA opinion. How does the Roberts opinion treat the Yoshida precedent? Does it cite the "different nature" sentence, and if so, in what context?

• The Court of International Trade in May 2026 used a Bretton-Woods-specific reading of Section 122's "balance-of-payments deficit" language. Is this the most natural reading of the statute? What is the strongest argument the administration can make on appeal?

• The two losses are sometimes described as a victory for "Article I tariff supremacy" (the constitutional principle that Congress, not the executive, lays tariffs). Is this characterisation accurate? Read Article I Section 8 of the United States Constitution and the leading scholarship by Saikrishna Prakash and Michael McConnell.

Section 6: The duration question

Nixon's 1971 surcharge lasted 127 days. It worked, in the sense that its actual purpose (forcing currency revaluation) was achieved at the Smithsonian. The 1975 CCPA grudgingly accepted that pattern: emergency, brief, contained. By contrast, the Trump tariff has been in force for more than a year on a stated rationale of structural permanence rather than negotiating leverage.

Discussion:

• Is "duration" a valid constitutional or statutory limit on emergency tariff power? Where does the limit come from? Is it textual (the words of the statute), structural (the architecture of Article I), or doctrinal (the CCPA's "different duration" warning)?

• Read Justice Jackson's three-tier framework in Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer (1952). Where does an emergency tariff fall on that framework: zone one (acting with congressional authorisation), zone two (acting in the face of congressional silence), or zone three (acting against congressional intent)?

• The Time Rhymes story argues that emergency tariff power in American law was built to be a four-month battering ram, not a four-year regime. Is this the right reading? What is the strongest counter-argument?

Section 7: The closing question

The Time Rhymes story closes with the line: "The court that decided their case did not know it was writing fifty years of tariff law. It thought it was deciding a zipper case."

Discussion (closing):

• What other small, technical cases have produced doctrinal warnings that became binding decades later? Compare with Schechter Poultry v. United States (1935), Crowell v. Benson (1932), and Marbury v. Madison (1803).

• If the Trump administration's appeal succeeds in 2026 or 2027 and the Supreme Court reverses the Learning Resources and V.O.S. Selections line, what will be the lasting effect on the Yoshida warning?

• If you had to write the analogous closing question for a future Time Rhymes story written in 2076, what would it say?

Suggested further reading

The Nixon Shock and the surcharge:

• Douglas A. Irwin, "The Nixon Shock after Forty Years: The Import Surcharge Revisited," World Trade Review 12 (2013): 29–56 (NBER Working Paper 17749).

• Jeffrey E. Garten, Three Days at Camp David: How a Secret Meeting in 1971 Transformed the Global Economy (2021).

• Federal Reserve History, "Nixon Ends Convertibility of U.S. Dollars to Gold and Announces Wage/Price Controls" (federalreservehistory.org).

The Yoshida case:

• Yoshida International, Inc. v. United States, 378 F.Supp. 1155 (Cust. Ct. 1974).

• United States v. Yoshida International, Inc., 526 F.2d 560 (C.C.P.A. 1975).

• William E. Holder, "Yoshida International, Inc. v. United States: Was the 1971 Tariff Surcharge a Lawful Exercise of Presidential Authority?" Michigan Law Review 73 (1975): 1003.

Section 122, IEEPA, and emergency tariff doctrine:

• Congressional Research Service, "The International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (NEA), and Tariffs: Historical Background and Key Issues" (CRS report IN11129).

• Congressional Research Service, "Trade Act of 1974: Section 122 Authority" (relevant CRS legal sidebars).

• Lawfare, "The Case Against IEEPA Tariffs" (lawfaremedia.org).

The 2025–26 litigation:

• Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, 607 U.S. ___ (2026), decided 20 February 2026.

• V.O.S. Selections, Inc. v. Trump, Federal Circuit mandate March 2026.

• Use the evidence manifest from the Time Rhymes story for primary news sources on the May 7 2026 Court of International Trade ruling and the refund process.