19-118 Panjiva, Inc. v. United States Customs and Border Protection UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SECOND CIRCUIT August Term, 2019 (Argued: December 11, 2019 Decided: September 17, 2020) Docket No. 19-118 PANJIVA, INC., A NEW YORK CORPORATION, TRADE DATA SERVICES, INC., DBA IMPORTGENIUS, AN ARIZONA CORPORATION, Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. UNITED STATES CUSTOMS AND BORDER PROTECTION, UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF TREASURY, Defendants-Appellees. Before: SACK, PARKER, and CHIN, Circuit Judges. Section 431 of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 requires all "vessel[s] arriving in the United States" to maintain a "manifest" on which is recorded information about the just-completed voyage and an account of what is "on board." Pub. L. No. 71-361, § 431, 46 Stat. 590, 710 (1930). An amendment passed in 1984 requires the information contained in those manifests to "be available for public disclosure." Pub. L. No. 98-573, Title II, § 203, 98 Stat. 2948, 2974 (1984). The plaintiffs-appellants, Panjiva, Inc., and Trade Data Services, Inc., dba 1 19-118 Panjiva, Inc. v. United States Customs and Border Protection ImportGenius, brought a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York asserting, among other things, that section 431 requires aircraft entering the United States to make available for public disclosure such manifests detailing the journey and cargo aboard. The district court (J. Paul Oetken, Judge) agreed with the government that the statute requires only waterborne vessels — and not aircraft — to publicly disclose such information, and ultimately dismissed part of the plaintiffs-appellants' complaint. The plaintiffs-appellants appeal that dismissal. For essentially the reasons articulated by the district court, we agree with its conclusion. The judgment is therefore: AFFIRMED. DAVID A. BAHR, Bahr Law Offices, P.C., Eugene, Oregon, for Plaintiffs-Appellants; STEPHEN CHA-KIM Assistant United States Attorney, (Christopher Connolly, on the brief), for Audrey Strauss, Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. SACK, Circuit Judge: BACKGROUND The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 is known principally for the tariffs it raised on imports to the United States and their alleged exacerbation of the Great Depression. See Robert Whaples, Where Is There Economic Consensus Among 2 19-118 Panjiva, Inc. v. United States Customs and Border Protection American Economic Historians? The Results of a Survey on Forty Propositions, 55 J. Econ. Hist. 139, 151 (1995). This appeal involves a lesser-known component of the Act — section 431 — which required all "vessel[s] arriving in the United States" to maintain a "manifest" on which is recorded information about the just-completed voyage and an account of what is "on board." Pub. L. No. 71-361, § 431, 46 Stat. 590, 710 (1930). Through a series of amendments over its long life, including one that apparently contained a drafting error and is the focus of the case at bar, section 431 has come to comprise, as the district court put it in its decision in this case, "an amalgamation of language from incompatible statutes." Panjiva, Inc. v. U.S. Customs & Border Prot., 342 F. Supp. 3d 481, 490 (S.D.N.Y. ...
Original document
Source: All recent Immigration Decisions In All the U.S. Courts of Appeals