The Court of International Trade sustained the Commerce Department's remand results in an administrative review of the antidumping duty order on circular welded carbon steel standard pipe and tube products from Turkey in a June 16 decision. The remand results brought Commerce's administrative review in line with the court's orders in a Feb. 17 opinion which told the agency to drop any particular market situation-related adjustments to the cost of production in the sales-below-cost test.

The Court of International Trade sustained in part and remanded in part the Commerce Department's remand results in an antidumping administrative review on welded line pipe from Korea in a June 7 decision made public on June 15 -- the second on the case. Judge Claire Kelly took issue with Commerce's decision to reallocate the costs of production for respondent NEXTEEL Co.'s non-prime welded line pipe products to its prime products when calculating NEXTEEL's constructed value in the review. The judge sustained all of Commerce's remaining determinations in the case including findings that a particular market situation did not exist in Korea for a key input of welded line pipe products and the agency's reversal, under protest, of its initial rejection of respondent SeAH's Steel Corp.'s third country sales data into Canada to calculate normal value.

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on June 15 affirmed without opinion a lower court ruling that found women’s trousers made of a yarn extruded from a slurry that contained zinc nanoparticles are not classifiable in the tariff schedule as if they were made from metallized yarn. The appeals court’s Rule 36 judgment follows oral argument held Oct. 10 in the case, appealed by Lockhart Textiles. The decision is non-precedential, and contains no explanation.

The Court of International Trade sustained the final results of the second administrative review of the antidumping duty order on steel nails from Oman, in a June 14 decision. Judge Richard Eaton held that there was substantial evidence to back the Commerce Department's decision to use a Japanese company's financial statement to determine constructed value profit and indirect selling expenses for mandatory respondent Oman Fasteners, as opposed to an Indian company's financial statement. Petitioner and plaintiff in the case, Mid Continent Steel & Wire, originally contested the selection.

Importers must file protests to preserve their ability to obtain refunds under exclusions from Section 301 tariffs, the Court of International Trade said in a June 11 decision. Judge Miller Baker dismissed a lawsuit from importers ARP Materials and Harrison Steel Castings Co., finding the court did not have jurisdiction to hear their challenge since they did not timely file protests of the CBP liquidations assessing the Section 301 duties. The importers had filed their lawsuits under CIT's residual Section 1581(i) jurisdiction, but that provision was unavailable because the importers were actually challenging a CBP classification decision, CIT said.

The Court of International Trade again found that President Donald Trump violated procedural time limits when expanding Section 232 tariffs to steel and aluminum "derivatives" in a June 10 decision. Relying on its recent ruling in a similar case involving nail importer PrimeSource, Judges Jennifer Choe-Groves and Timothy Stanceu, as part of a three-judge panel, awarded refunds to Oman Fasteners, Huttig Building Products and Huttig Inc. The panel ruled that the president illegally announced the tariff expansion after the 105-day deadline laid out by Section 232, but denied the plaintiff's other two claims, without prejudice, on the procedural violations of the tariff expansion.

Antidumping duty China-wide rates can still be based on adverse facts available (AFA) even if no members of the countrywide entity were found to be uncooperative in an administrative review, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said in a June 10 decision reversing a decision to the contrary from the Court of International Trade.

The Commerce Department can apply total adverse facts available for a mandatory respondent's failure to provide its factors of production data on a product-specific basis in an antidumping case, the Court of International Trade ruled in a June 9 opinion. Judge Leo Gordon, in a consolidated action challenging an antidumping administrative review on steel nails from China, said Commerce had the right to switch to the control number-specific reporting requirement and the mandatory respondent should have known about this switch. Gordon also found that Commerce was justified in including the total AFA rate for two of the three mandatory respondents in the average for the non-individually reviewed respondents' rate.

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on June 2 upheld a Court of International Trade ruling that S.C. Johnson's Ziploc brand reclosable sandwich bags are classified under Harmonized Tariff Schedule heading 3923 as articles for the conveyance or packing of other goods, dutiable at 3%, and not in heading 3924 as plastic household goods, which are eligible for duty-free GSP treatment. Since the bags could fall under either heading 3923 or 3924, heading 3923 is the correct home for the bags since its terms are "more difficult to satisfy and describe the article with a greater degree of accuracy and certainty," the Federal Circuit said in upholding CIT's decision.

The Court of International Trade in a June 2 opinion remanded an antidumping administrative review on multilayered wood flooring from China back to the Commerce Department after a related ruling in the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit found the mandatory respondents to not be subject to the AD order. In the remand, Commerce is to determine a new rate for the separate rate respondents in the review now that the existing 0.79% dumping margin for the mandatory respondents no longer applies.