The passage of the Uruguay Round implementing legislation represents a natural opportunity to review the policy goals of the U.S. import trade laws, to assess how well current laws achieve those objectives, and to explore possible reforms. The author argues that there are a variety of policy concerns justifying a circumscribed set of import trade statutes. The relevant U.S. laws, however, have largely become divorced from such national welfare considerations and are now too often a mechanism for furtive protectionism. The Uruguay Round effected some (marginal) improvements but left the fundamental structure of the laws unchanged. The author discusses possible reforms in the final section of the paper.
