Wikipedia Deep Dive

De minimis

12 min read

In 2022, the Chinese e-commerce giants Shein and Temu paid exactly zero dollars in import duties to the United States. Meanwhile, their brick-and-mortar competitors H&M and Gap paid two hundred five million dollars and seven hundred million dollars respectively. How is that possible? The answer lies in one of law's most elegant principles: that some things are simply too small to bother with.

The Eagle Does Not Catch Flies

The Latin phrase "de minimis non curat lex" translates roughly to "the law does not concern itself with trifles." It's a doctrine that dates back to the fifteenth century, born from the practical recognition that courts and legal systems have limited time and resources. Why waste a judge's afternoon arguing over a stolen paperclip?

Queen Christina of Sweden, who reigned from 1633 to 1654, favored a more vivid expression of the same idea: "aquila non capit muscas" — the eagle does not catch flies. There's something almost poetic about it. An eagle soaring above the landscape doesn't dive for insects. Its prey is larger, worthier of its attention. So too with the law.

But here's where things get interesting. What counts as a fly? What qualifies as trifling? That question has spawned centuries of legal debate and, in our modern era of global e-commerce, has become the center of an international trade war worth billions of dollars.

The Eight Hundred Dollar Loophole

Every country sets what's called a "de minimis threshold" for imports. This is the value below which goods can enter the country without anyone paying customs duties or import taxes. Ship something worth less than this amount, and it sails through untouched by tariffs.

In 2016, the United States raised its threshold from two hundred dollars to eight hundred dollars per person per day. The reasoning seemed sound: processing tiny shipments costs money, and the administrative burden often exceeds whatever duties would be collected. Better to wave through the small stuff and focus enforcement resources elsewhere.

This gave America one of the highest de minimis levels in the world. For comparison, as of 2024, Australia's threshold sat at six hundred seventy-three dollars. The European Union allowed only one hundred sixty-six dollars. Japan, notoriously strict, set its limit at just seventy-one dollars.

And then came the deluge.

One Billion Packages

In the decade following America's threshold increase, the number of de minimis shipments entering the country exploded from approximately one hundred forty million per year to over one billion. That's billion, with a B. The culprits were obvious: direct-to-consumer e-commerce platforms, particularly Shein and Temu, which ship products directly from Chinese factories to American doorsteps in individual packages, each carefully priced below the magic eight hundred dollar line.

The system was working exactly as designed, which turned out to be the problem. Every package sliding under the threshold represented lost tariff revenue and, perhaps more importantly, a competitive advantage over American retailers and importers who brought goods in bulk and paid duties on everything.

The Biden administration responded with new regulations requiring additional data on de minimis shipments and excluding certain product categories — solar panels, steel, aluminum, textiles, apparel, and footwear — from the exemption. Section 301 tariffs, specifically targeting Chinese goods, covered approximately seventy percent of textile and apparel imports from China.

But the most dramatic action came in April 2025. President Donald Trump signed an executive order ending the de minimis exemption entirely for all products from China, effective May 2. Congress followed with legislation to eliminate the exemption for all countries by July 2027. Then Trump accelerated things further, moving the closure date to August 2025, citing national emergencies.

The eagle, it seems, has decided to start catching flies after all.

When Small Means Free in Tax Law

The de minimis principle extends far beyond customs. It threads through tax codes worldwide, creating fascinating pockets where small things simply don't count.

Consider employee benefits. Under United States Internal Revenue Service guidelines, some benefits are so minor that requiring employers to report them would be unreasonable or administratively impractical. If you use your company's photocopier to make a personal copy, technically that's a benefit with monetary value. But tracking and taxing every page would be absurd. So the tax code looks the other way.

There's a catch, though. Cash is never de minimis. Give an employee a fifty dollar gift card, and it's taxable income. Give them fifty dollars worth of office supplies for personal use, and it might not be. The reasoning is that cash is too liquid, too fungible, too easily turned into anything. It's impossible to argue that money is trivial.

For bond investors, de minimis creates a particularly elegant rule. If you buy a bond at a discount to its face value — say, you pay nine hundred fifty dollars for a bond that will pay out one thousand dollars at maturity — that fifty dollar difference is called market discount. Normally, it would be taxed as ordinary income. But if the discount is small enough, specifically less than one quarter of a percent of face value times the number of years until maturity, the tax code treats it as zero. You pay capital gains rates instead of income tax rates, a meaningful benefit for investors.

The Two Dollar Donation

In Australia, charitable donations become tax deductible only when they reach two dollars. This threshold was set in 1966, when Australia switched from pounds, shillings, and pence to decimal currency.

It has never been updated.

Nearly six decades of inflation have rendered this amount almost comically trivial. Two dollars in 1966 would be worth roughly twenty-five dollars today. Yet the law remains frozen, a de minimis threshold that time has made meaningless. Every donation above two dollars — which is to say, essentially every donation — now qualifies for deduction.

This is what happens when de minimis thresholds aren't indexed to inflation. The line drawn to separate significant from trivial drifts ever further from economic reality.

Three Hundred Thousand Euros of State Aid

The European Union applies de minimis thinking to government subsidies in a particularly sophisticated way. Under EU regulations, a government can provide up to three hundred thousand euros to a business over any rolling three-year period without triggering the complex rules that govern state aid.

For land transport companies, the ceiling drops to one hundred thousand euros, reflecting that industry's particular sensitivity to competitive distortions.

The logic is that small amounts of government support — grants, tax breaks, subsidized loans — don't meaningfully distort competition across the European single market. A bakery receiving fifty thousand euros to upgrade its ovens isn't going to undercut bakeries in neighboring countries. But once support grows beyond these thresholds, the EU's competition authorities want to scrutinize whether the aid unfairly advantages one company over others.

Similar thinking applies to competition law more broadly. Agreements between companies that might technically violate antitrust rules are considered de minimis if the parties involved are small enough. Horizontal agreements — deals between direct competitors — generally escape scrutiny if the combined market share is ten percent or less. Vertical agreements, between companies at different levels of the supply chain, get more leeway: fifteen percent.

Sampling and the Six-Second Question

When one artist samples another's work — taking a snippet of an existing recording and incorporating it into a new song — the question arises: how much is too little to matter?

In the case of Newton versus Beastie Boys, the answer was: six seconds isn't enough. James Newton had composed a piece called "Choir," and the Beastie Boys sampled six seconds of it for their track "Pass the Mic." Newton sued for copyright infringement. He lost. The court found the use so minimal, so trivial, that it fell below the threshold of legal concern.

But in a different case, Bridgeport Music versus Dimension Films, an appeals court explicitly refused to recognize any de minimis standard for digital sampling. The ruling created a split in how different jurisdictions treat the issue, leaving musicians and producers in legal uncertainty.

The video game NBA 2K faced similar questions when it digitally recreated basketball players complete with their real tattoos. Those tattoos were copyrighted works. Did including them in a game constitute infringement? The court said no — the use was de minimis, too minor to warrant protection.

Murder and the Minimum

Perhaps nowhere is de minimis applied more carefully than in criminal law.

In North American drug law, the de minimis rule (also called the minority rule) requires that there be a usable quantity of a controlled substance before charges can be brought. Residue on a pipe, trace amounts on a scale — these might not meet the threshold. There must be enough of the substance that someone could actually consume it.

In Canadian criminal law, de minimis serves as a preliminary test for serious charges. For second-degree murder, prosecutors must show that the accused's actions were a contributing cause of death "beyond de minimis." If someone's contribution to a fatal outcome was trivially small, murder charges may not be appropriate even if technically some causal connection existed.

This connects to a broader philosophy in criminology called the minimalist approach. Criminal law, this thinking goes, should be a last resort. It carries severe consequences: incarceration removes people's freedom of movement, criminal records follow people for life, and enforcement consumes enormous public resources. Before criminalizing behavior, we should ask whether other sanctions might work — civil liability, regulatory fines, social disapproval. Only when these alternatives fail should the criminal law step in.

The European Convention on Human Rights embodies this minimalist philosophy, requiring that criminal penalties be proportionate and that less restrictive alternatives be considered. Direct crimes like murder, rape, and assault will always warrant criminal response. But in grayer areas, the de minimis principle counsels restraint.

Education Beyond the Minimal

In 2017, the United States Supreme Court unanimously answered a question about how much effort schools must make to educate students with disabilities.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act — known as IDEA — guarantees students with disabilities the right to a "free appropriate public education." But what does "appropriate" mean? The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled that schools need only provide "merely more than de minimis" educational benefit. As long as students learned something, anything beyond nothing, the law was satisfied.

The Supreme Court disagreed emphatically. In Endrew versus Douglas County School District, the justices ruled that de minimis was far too low a bar. Students with disabilities deserve educational programs "reasonably calculated to enable a child to make progress appropriate in light of the child's circumstances." Simply exceeding the trivial threshold of "more than nothing" fails that standard.

It was a rare case where the law explicitly rejected de minimis reasoning, finding that some contexts demand more than merely avoiding the trivial.

Buses and Environmental Effects

Following bus deregulation in Great Britain in 1986, local authorities gained the ability to contract for supplementary bus services without competitive tendering, but only up to certain de minimis limits. Small contracts — truly minor additions to local transport — could be let directly. Larger ones required the full competitive process.

In New Zealand environmental planning, de minimis appears frequently in assessments of environmental effects. When evaluating whether a proposed development might harm the environment, planners often find that some impacts exist but are "so minor that they are close to negligible or zero in nature." Adding one more vehicle to a busy crossing might have a theoretical impact on traffic, but the effect is de minimis — too small to warrant regulatory concern or mitigation requirements.

Risk assessors use similar language when discussing acceptable danger levels. The de minimis risk level is the highest risk still considered too small to worry about. Only risks above this threshold require active management. Some call this the "virtually safe" level — acknowledging that zero risk is usually impossible while drawing a practical line below which concern becomes unproductive.

The Problem with Trifles

The elegance of de minimis lies in its practicality. Legal systems, like all human institutions, have finite attention. Courts have limited dockets. Tax authorities have limited auditors. Border agents have limited time per package. Drawing lines below which things simply don't count allows these systems to function.

But the principle creates genuine tensions. What seems trivial to the legal system may be significant to the individuals involved. A small-time borrower who feels cheated by a minor overcharge has little recourse if the amount falls below de minimis thresholds for legal action. The aggregate effect of many de minimis violations might be substantial even if each individual instance isn't.

And as the Shein and Temu example demonstrates, clever actors can engineer their behavior to exploit de minimis thresholds systematically. Break a large shipment into many small ones. Structure each transaction to fall just below the line. Suddenly the exception swallows the rule.

The eagle cannot catch every fly. But if the flies organize themselves cleverly, they might carry off the eagle's dinner while it watches from above, too dignified to respond.

A Thousand Years of Not Sweating the Small Stuff

From fifteenth-century civil law through twenty-first-century e-commerce, the de minimis doctrine endures because it answers a practical question that every legal system must face: how small is too small to care about?

The answer varies by context and changes over time. Australia's two-dollar donation threshold made sense in 1966 but is meaningless today. America's eight-hundred-dollar import threshold made sense in 2016 but facilitated a billion-package loophole by 2024. The line between trivial and significant is always moving, shaped by technology, economics, and political will.

Yet the underlying principle remains constant. The praetor does not concern himself with trifles. The law does not catch flies. Some things are simply too small to matter.

Until, suddenly, they're not.