Judge Richard Eaton got his start as a Village Justice for Cooperstown, N.Y., handling petty crimes and small-dollar disputes in the tiny rural region, with a population around 2,000.
His current position—as a judge on the largely overlooked Court of International Trade—seems nearly as obscure. Except he finds himself in a showdown with the Trump administration about how to hand out $166 billion in refunds now that the president’s sweeping global tariffs were ruled illegal.
Eaton wasn’t the judge anyone expected to steer the legal fight for refunds. When the genial 77-year-old Albany Law School graduate walked into his courtroom in lower Manhattan last week, he was presiding over a single refund case—involving a filtration company—that no one was watching.
But he quickly signaled to the lawyers assembled that he was now in control of all of the sprawling refund litigation before the trade court. In Eaton’s eyes, the refund question didn’t look that complicated. The government had issued refunds to importers before and could easily do so again, he said. He successfully pushed the administration to kick off the process.
Lawyers who know Eaton weren’t surprised to see the seasoned judge take such a decisive and practical approach.
“Once he did the research and arrived at a conclusion, he was always confident in following his instincts,” said Matthew Skinner, who clerked for the judge from 2009 to 2011.
Judicial orders to refund improperly collected tariffs are a standard remedy in the world of international trade. But they typically happen on a much smaller scale, making Eaton’s potential face-off with the administration unusual. After the Supreme Court ruled against Trump’s signature trade policy last month, many of the justices have found themselves in the president’s crosshairs. Trump called the court’s three liberals a “disgrace to our nation” and said two of his own appointees, Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch, had embarrassed their families.
But those who know Eaton intimately describe the avid traveler as fearless.
“You can call it courageous,” said Don Cameron, a senior counsel at Taft Stettinius & Hollister, which is representing businesses in some of those lawsuits. “I would expect there might be blowback.”
A native of upstate New York, Eaton attended law school in Albany like his father, uncle and brother before him. He often hires recent graduates of his alma mater to be his law clerks.
Eaton spent the first part of his legal career bouncing between private practice and government work. He served as a campaign manager and later chief of staff to former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a New York Democrat. While Eaton held many positions over the years, he worked for Moynihan starting in the late 1970s. He said in his Senate judiciary questionnaire when he was being confirmed to the trade court that the most difficult and satisfying was his position as the senator’s legislative director.
“Working for the Senate’s most prominent scholar/legislator meant that any idea for proposed legislation would have to be supported by hours of painstaking labor to make sure that the facts were right and the policy sound,” he wrote.
Eaton was working for Moynihan when the Senator suggested to President Bill Clinton that he appoint Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court; as a staff member, he helped smooth her confirmation process in 1993. A photo of Eaton walking with the late justice into her Senate confirmation hearing hangs in his private chambers, along with letters Ginsburg wrote effusively thanking him for helping her get to the high court.
Eaton, however, has led a much lower-profile career than the “Notorious RBG.” He was appointed to the little-known Court of International Trade by Clinton in 1999.
It is rare for the cases that come before Eaton in the trade court to make headlines. A typical case often involves importers arguing over how goods are classified when they enter the U.S. because it affects the amount of duties owed.
Larry Friedman, a lawyer at Barnes, Richardson & Colburn, remembers arguing a case before Eaton over whether an industrial grinder should be deemed a shredder. The judge asked so many questions about the machine’s functions that Friedman grew concerned it would look as if he were testifying on his client’s behalf.
But Eaton just wanted to get a practical understanding of how it worked to resolve the case, Friedman said.
Unlike some judges, who may lose patience while grilling attorneys, Eaton is polite to the lawyers appearing before him and speaks with a warmth in his voice.
He entered partial retirement more than a decade ago when he assumed senior status in 2014, a role which typically involves hearing fewer cases. His wife, Susan Henshaw Jones, stepped down as director of the Museum of the City of New York a year later, telling the New York Times she was looking forward to relaxing with her husband in Key West, Fla., and Montana.
Any dreams of a quiet semi-retired life were upended when the tariff-refund case of Atmus Filtration Inc. v. United States landed on Eaton’s desk. The case seemed to have been plucked from obscurity and was largely indistinguishable from the 2,000 other lawsuits that had been filed ahead of it by companies trying to get their money back.
The only unique feature was that the filtration company had asked the court to step in on an emergency basis and immediately stop Customs and Border Protection from finalizing import payments that included the now voided tariffs.
Lawyers say the trade court keeps a judge on call to act quickly when parties come to court seeking an emergency intervention and that was likely how the refund issue ended up in Eaton’s lap. He has said that the court’s chief judge indicated he would be the only judge to hear the cases seeking refunds.
Eaton has moved at a speed not seen at the trade court, where cases typically flow at a relaxed pace, lawyers said. He held his first hearing even after Atmus Filtration tried to withdraw its emergency request for the court’s intervention. One attorney said he had never seen a judge on the court do that before.
During the hearing, Eaton told the government there is nothing particularly novel about the customs refund process. “I believe that there will be no chaos associated with the provision of these refunds and that it will not result in a mess,” he said.