A federal court held the very first hearing on President Donald Trump’s wide-ranging, so-called Liberation Day tariffs on Tuesday, offering the earliest window into whether those tariffs — and potentially all of the shifting tariffs Trump has imposed since he retook office — will be struck down. The case is V.O.S. Selections v. Trump.

It is unclear how the three-judge panel that heard the case will rule, but it appears somewhat more likely than not that they will rule that the tariffs are unlawful. All three of the judges, who sit on the US Court of International Trade, appeared troubled by the Trump administration’s claim that the judiciary may not review the legality of the tariffs at all. But Jeffrey Schwab, the lawyer representing several small businesses challenging the tariffs, also faced an array of skeptical questions.

Many of the judges’ questions focused on United States v. Yoshida International (1975), a federal appeals court decision which upheld a 10 percent tariff President Richard Nixon briefly imposed on nearly all foreign goods.

That is understandable: Yoshida remains binding on the trade court, and the three judges must take it into account when they make their decision. It is not, however, binding upon the Supreme Court, whose justices will be free to ignore Yoshida if they want. Ultimately, that means it is unclear how much influence the trade court’s eventual decision will have over the Supreme Court, which is likely to have the final word on the tariffs.

At the heart of V.O.S. Selections are four key words in the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA), the statute Trump relied on when he imposed these tariffs.

That statute permits the president to “regulate” transactions involving foreign goods — a verb which Yoshida held is expansive enough to permit tariffs — but only “to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat with respect to which a national emergency has been declared.” It is likely that the trade court’s decision will turn on what the words “unusual and extraordinary threat” means. While Yoshida offered guidance on “regulate,” there appears to be few, if any, precedents interpreting what those four words mean.

In his executive order laying out the rationale for these tariffs, Trump claimed they are needed to combat “large and persistent annual US goods trade deficits” — meaning that the United States buys more goods from many countries than it sells to them. But it’s far from........

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