Trade Compliance Tariff Monitoring

PEPIndex for Legal & Trade Compliance Teams

Statutory authority tracking

Every PEPI event is classified with the legal authority invoked for the tariff action: IEEPA, Section 301, Section 232, Section 122, USMCA, or Executive Order. This classification is sourced from Federal Register document headers, USTR press releases, and court dockets — not inferred from news text.

For trade compliance teams, this means each event in the API carries a reliable statutory_authority field that can be used to filter for specific authority types, monitor known legal vulnerabilities, and track which authorities have been challenged or invalidated by courts.

Federal Register linkage per event

Each PEPI event is automatically matched to Federal Register documents — Executive Orders, Presidential Proclamations, tariff schedules, and presidential memoranda — using the Federal Register API. The link includes the document number, EO/proclamation number, effective date, html_url, and abstract.

This means you can trace a tariff threat from the original presidential statement to the codified FR document in a single API call to GET /api/v1/events/{id}/federal-register.

Event lifecycle and regulatory outcomes

Court ruling monitoring

PEPI monitors the U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT) and Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) for rulings that affect tariff validity and trade policy legality. Relevant rulings are matched to PEPI events and reflected in the event timeline.

Two complementary court data sources provide redundant coverage:

• CourtListener API v4 (primary) — free API with CIT/CAFC RSS feeds; covers cases mirrored via the RECAP browser extension. Runs every 6 hours.
• PACER PCL (Case Locator) (automated fallback) — official federal REST API (pcl.uscourts.gov/pcl-public-api) queried automatically when CourtListener errors. Searches courtId=["citdc","cafc"] directly. Cost: $0.10/page, waived under $30/quarter. Niche CIT dockets with zero RECAP coverage are surfaced here.

Notable tracked rulings include the SCOTUS IEEPA invalidation (February 2026), the CIT Section 122 invalidation (May 2026), and Section 122 authority expiration (July 2026) — all cross-referenced against Atlantic Council Trump Tariff Tracker.

Key API endpoints for trade compliance

• GET /api/v1/events?domain=trade — All trade events with statutory authority and outcome type (Standard)
• GET /api/v1/events/{id}/federal-register — Linked EOs, proclamations, and tariff schedules (Standard)
• GET /api/v1/events/{id}/timeline — Full lifecycle from threat to resolution (Standard)
• GET /api/v1/courts — CIT and CAFC courts tracked by CourtListener (Standard)
• GET /api/v1/tariff-rates — Current applied rates (what is actually being enforced) (Standard)

Limitations and intended use

PEPI provides structured signal and source linkage — it is not a substitute for legal analysis or compliance review. The statutory authority classification and Federal Register linkage are designed to help compliance teams find and track the right official documents quickly, not to provide legal advice or definitive HTS classification.

For duty rate calculation (HTS lookup, Chapter 99 stacking, country of origin determination), PEPI does not provide tariff classification services. It provides the applied rates that result from classification, after exemptions and policy reversals, from USITC DataWeb.