Legal Tea Time

Tea, made from the Camellia sinensis plant, is the most-widely consumed beverage in the world after water. According to the Tea Association of the USA, Americans consume over 2.5 billion gallons of tea a year, with approximately 85% of that as iced tea.

Tea and law have gone together for centuries, and the beverage continues to be the subject of statutes, regulations, and cases to this day. Consider this smattering of tea and the law resources and topics:

• Law of Tea.com is an extensive web resource for the tea industry. The tea laws page gives an overview of statutes and other laws regulating the business, while court decisions of interest highlights caselaw on customs duties, registered names, and tea trade.
• Great Britain’s Tea Act of 1773 granted the East India Company a monopoly on tea trade in the British colonies. The result—the Boston Tea Party.
• Modern day tea laws include those listed on the Policy & Legislations page of the Tea Board of India, and Kenya’s Tea Regulations from 2008.
• In the U.S., South Carolina designated tea as the official hospitality beverage of the state with State Bill 3487, Act No. 31 in 1995 (bet you didn’t know there was such a thing as an “official hospitality beverage”).
• In the 2006 case of Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficente Uniao do Vegetal 546 U.S. 418, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the use of a hallucinogenic tea (not our garden-variety Camellia sinensis) for ceremonial religious purposes.