Definition
The act of bringing goods, merchandise, or other commodities into a country from a foreign country or from outside a defined territorial boundary. In United States law, importation carries specific constitutional and statutory significance: the moment at which goods cross into national territory triggers federal customs authority, duties obligations, and the exclusive power of Congress to regulate commerce with foreign nations.
Importation is not merely the physical movement of goods across a border. Courts and customs authorities have defined it as a completed act with a precise legal moment — generally when goods arrive within the limits of a port of entry and come under the jurisdiction of customs officials — rather than a continuous process beginning at the point of origin abroad.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The act or instance of importing; bringing commodities or wares into a country from abroad; also used broadly for conveying something into any system, place, or area.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The act or practice of importing, or bringing into a country or state, opposed to exportation; also, that which is imported.
The gap between common and legal usage is one of precision, not direction. Ordinary usage treats importation as a continuous journey — goods are being "imported" from the moment they leave the foreign seller. Legal usage fixes importation as a discrete event with a determinable moment of completion that triggers legal consequences: the attachment of duties, the vesting of federal jurisdiction, and the application of regulatory restrictions. That distinction between process and event is critical in customs disputes and constitutional analysis.
Core Elements
The legal definition of importation has been tested in courts principally around three questions:
1. What constitutes importation: Goods must be brought from outside the country's territorial jurisdiction into it. Goods in transit through a country, or placed in a bonded warehouse, have generated litigation over whether importation is complete or still pending.
2. When duties accrue: The duty obligation attaches at the moment of legal importation — not when goods are ordered, shipped, or unloaded, but when they enter the country's commerce under the relevant customs framework.
3. Who qualifies as an importer: The importer is not necessarily the owner of the goods. Courts have distinguished the legal importer (the party who causes the goods to be brought in and takes responsibility at customs) from the owner or ultimate purchaser, with consequences for liability and standing.
Why It Matters in Research
Constitutional dimension is the central research trap. Bouvier identifies the provision at U.S. Constitution Art. I, § 10, which bars states from laying imposts or duties on imports without congressional consent. This means that in historical American sources, importation is not just a customs word — it appears in state-versus-federal commerce disputes, Reconstruction-era commerce clause litigation, and dormant commerce clause analysis. A researcher focused only on tariff law will miss the constitutional strand, and vice versa.
The moment-of-importation question generated significant early Supreme Court litigation. Rapalje & Lawrence points to the line of cases running through 9 Cranch 104 and 1 Gallison 206, 210 on what constitutes importation, and 13 Peters 486, 494 on when duties accrue. These are early nineteenth-century federal decisions and reflect the formative period of American customs law. Researchers using these sources should note that the doctrinal framework they establish predates the modern administrative customs apparatus by more than a century; later statutory development under the Tariff Acts (including the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 and its successors) layered significant statutory definition over common-law foundations.
The importer question (who is not an importer: 8 Wallace 110; 4 Allen (Mass.) 110) is a recurring research issue in commercial disputes where ownership of goods, insurance coverage, and liability for duties are contested. These cases should be checked against later statutory definitions, which may diverge.
For researchers working with non-U.S. sources, note that the term carries similar meaning in British and Commonwealth customs law, but the constitutional dimension is purely American. Rapalje & Lawrence includes an English reference (L.R. 1 C.P. 575) on the meaning of "importer" in a statute — a reminder that English sources treat this as an interpretive rather than constitutional question.
Historical Dictionary Support
All five source dictionaries agree on the core definition: importation is the act of bringing goods and merchandise into a country from a foreign country. The definitions are nearly identical across Black's (both editions), Burrill, and Rapalje & Lawrence. This unanimity reflects a term whose basic contours were settled early.
Bouvier adds the most substantive content, identifying the constitutional provision and citing early Supreme Court authority. This makes Bouvier the most useful starting point for historical research with a constitutional dimension. The other dictionaries function as confirmatory rather than analytical sources for this term.
The second edition of Black's contains a puzzling intrusion: its entry for IMPORTATION begins with a list of unrelated terms ("Covenant," "Dedication," "Easement," etc.) before delivering the definition. This appears to be a cross-reference artifact of the original print edition rather than substantive content and should not be treated as part of the definition.
None of the historical dictionaries address importation in the context of intellectual property (importation of copyrighted works, patent exhaustion doctrine) or immigration (the historical use of "importation" in statutes governing the bringing of persons into the country, including in slavery-era law). These are significant legal uses of the term that post-date or fall outside the scope of the nineteenth-century dictionaries but that researchers will encounter in primary sources.
Jurisdictional Note
In U.S. federal law, importation is primarily governed by Congress under the Commerce Clause and the Import-Export Clause. States are constitutionally constrained in taxing imports. International researchers should note that while the commercial definition is broadly shared across common-law jurisdictions, the constitutional framework limiting state authority is specific to the United States federal structure.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Customs and Tariff Law; Commerce Clause; Import-Export Clause.