The courts have said over and over that in the language of commerce and in the everyday language of the streets, a whale must be considered to be a fish because it lives in the sea. Also, they have said the tomato is a vegetable because it is sold and eaten as a vegetable. And rhubarb in the legal world has become a fruit because it is bought and sold as a fruit.
In most cases, the appraisers have no difficulty in establishing the proper rate of duty to be paid on an import because the rate is fixed by law and the import is easily identified. But there are a great many imports not identified in any of the tariff acts or the amendments adopted by Congress, a lack which often creates difficulties, as it did when one importer brought in a shipment of Chinese mah-jongg sets.
The dominolike pieces used in playing the game were made of bone and bamboo. The importer and the government agreed that the material of chief value in the mah-jongg pieces was bone. The importer insisted that the duty should be 20 per cent of the value because the games were “manufactures of bone.” However the Collector classified these sets as “dominoes” and set the duty at 50 per cent. He ruled that the mah-jongg pieces came under the paragraph 341 of the Tariff Act of 1913 which provided for a duty of that rate on “dice, dominoes, draughts, chess men, and billiard, pool, bagatelle balls, and poker chips of ivory, bone or other material.”
This case also found its way into the Customs Court. The government attorneys argued that the mah-jongg pieces should be classed as “dominoes by similitude” even though they were not specifically listed under the acts passed by Congress.
The importer argued through his attorneys that the mah-jongg sets were not specifically named by Congress in any of the classifications established in the various acts and therefore the duty should be applied on the “component material of chief value.”
In this case the ruling went against the government. The court held that the mah-jongg sets were properly classifiable at 20 per cent as manufactures in which bone was the “component material of chief value.”
The appraisers’ staffs make millions of classifications each year on imported items, and there is remarkably little dispute over their decisions. Out of these millions, no more than 700 are disputed and contested in the courts annually.
Sometimes a seemingly obscure and innocuous ruling on a classification will blow up a storm across the country. Such a case developed when an importer brought in from Europe do-it-yourself kits containing parts of a miniature electric train and engine to be assembled by the purchaser.
The locomotives, freight cars, cabooses, passenger cars, track, and other equipment were precision-made scale models of larger railroad equipment. They were all made to a standard “HO” scale of 3.5 millimeters to one foot. The trains were designed to run at the scale speed, which meant that at maximum speed they would travel 60 feet a minute. At that speed, they would simulate the operation of a full-size train.
All of the equipment was manufactured according to the strictest standards set up by the National Model Railroad Association. This Association has been described as “an organization of adult model railroad hobbyists founded in 1935 to make and promulgate standards for wheels, flanges, rails, switches, and other working parts of model railroads, with the purpose of achieving interchangeability of equipment from different manufacturers.”