Over much of the past century, the law governing third-party importation of non-counterfeit, "genuine" goods has been shrouded in mists of conceptual uncertainty. In recent years, the debate over the "gray market" has centered on the fundamental reasons for trademark protection, and has raised the possibility of conflict between the two traditionally recognized "purposes" of trademark law--(1) protecting consumers from deception and (2) protecting trademark owners from lost sales. Another fundamental and vexing issue has been the legitimacy and meaning of the "territoriality principle" of U.S. trademark law. Beginning with a review of the earliest days of trademark law, this study traces the development of the "twofold purpose" and "territoriality" doctrines in the United States, and examines in detail the cases, statutes, and regulations governing parallel imports. Unlike other recent treatments of the topic, this study benefits from the availability of important archival materials, and devotes considerable attention to the nineteenth-century antecedents of modern parallel importation doctrine, and to the evolution of trademark doctrine within the broader context of American legal realism. The study concludes that import protection should extend only to the domestic mark holder whose business is factually distinct from the foreign source of the gray market imports.
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