The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), charged with analyzing, promoting and representing America's international trade interests abroad, recently fired a salvo against the European Union (EU). Invoking dispute resolution procedures at the World Trade Organization (WTO), U.S. Trade Rep Robert Zoellick hopes to solve a problem small and medium size U.S. exporters face getting their wares through customs on the Continent.

Late last year, the non-vessel operating common carrier (NVOCC) segment of the ocean transportation intermediary industry plucked an arm from the stockade of contract prohibition (see December 2004 <EM>Legal Lookout</EM> article). The U.S. Federal Maritime Commission (FMC) had granted NVOCCs provisional permission to enter into volume- and time-intensive contracts with their shippers, allowing them to enjoy, if a bit belatedly, the same freedom of contract the Ocean Shipping Reform Act (OSRA) be

The bill of lading's evolving style and format reflect the progression of transportation as an industry, culture and technology-dependent business over thousands of years. That's fitting, inasmuch as the bill of lading's purpose since Roman times has been just that: to be an alter ego of the freight it documents.

As if international trade's deadlines and other timing concerns weren't challenging enough already, now America's importers - and the transportation service providers who service them - have another concern in their scheduling equations.

Now that you've had a three-month dose of security program substance, it's time to take a look at how the Bureau of Customs and Border Patrol (CBP or, here, Customs) plans to implement the CT-PAT program, the Container Security Initiative, the 24-Hour Advance Vessel Manifest Rule, and related concepts. Briefly, the feds will use hi-tech data exchange and storage systems implemented by newly formed Customs sub-departments, and reconstitute interrelated functions performed by Department of

The war on terrorism is just that: a war in every sense but the most traditional. Foreign invaders are trying to besiege and conquer us, to take what's rightfully ours, to attack us right here in our homeland. We want to keep them out. To do so, we are designing and putting up barricades, technological fortifications to defend ourselves.

The Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism, known as "C-T PAT," isn't the first time Uncle Sam has buddied up with the international trade industry toward a common goal. The erstwhile U.S. Customs Service of the Department of the Treasury, on a couple occasions sought to incentivize, or at least entice, the private sector into streamlining entry by dangling certain goodies before players' noses. But C-T PAT is by far the most important initiative, in terms both of purposes served an

Generally, one’s conduct must comport with that of the law’s nebulously defined and sometimes capriciously applied barometer, the "reasonably prudent man," lest one find one’s self liable under legal negligence theories.