The Department of Justice and plaintiff-appellee Mid Continent Steel & Wire both filed corrected response briefs to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit after the appellate court found their initial submissions to not be in compliance with court rules. The Federal Circuit said that the U.S.'s brief had an incomplete case number on the cover, since it didn't include all consolidated case numbers, and that it failed to follow the court's format for referencing the underlying record. Mid Continent's brief also suffered from this latter problem while also including a mismatch of the contact information for Lauren Fraid, counsel for Mid Continent, between the brief and the user's account (Xi'an Metals & Minerals Import & Export Co. v. U.S., Fed. Cir. #21-2205).

A case brought by Canadian exporter J.D. Irving challenging the Commerce Department's antidumping duty cash deposit instructions to CBP was assigned to Judge Timothy Reif in a Jan. 5 order. The complaint contests the instruction that follows the final results of the 2019 administrative review of the AD duty order on softwood lumber products from Canada. Neither J.D. Irving nor any U.S. lumber producer requested a review of the exporter for the 2020 period of review, yet Commerce nevertheless replaced J.D. Irving's 2020 AD cash deposit rate with a dumping rate for the 2019 period, the complaint said. In doing so, the agency acted "arbitrarily and inconsistent with Congress's intent," the exporter argued. When no one requested a 2020 review, this signaled that "both sides" agreed that the cash deposit rate in effect was an accurate measure of J.D. Irving's dumping level for assessing final AD duties during 2020 and that the most recent AD cash deposit rate was the "appropriate estimated dumping margin for J.D. Irving going forward," the company said (J.D. Irving, Limited v. U.S., CIT #21-00641).

The Commerce Department should have reopened the record during its voluntary remand period to consider the question of affiliation between antidumping duty respondent OCTAL and one of its U.S. customers, OCTAL told the Court of International Trade in a Dec. 22 reply brief. Since Commerce raised the issue so late in the AD review, the record wasn't "high quality" and OCTAL didn't have a chance to properly respond to the affiliation accusations, OCTAL said (OCTAL v. U.S., CIT #20-03697).

The following lawsuits were recently filed at the Court of International Trade:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued its mandate in an antidumping duty case involving Commerce's methods for identifying masked dumping, officially remanding the matter to the Commerce Department. In July 2021, the Federal Circuit held that Commerce must further explain its use of a statistical test when conducting its differential pricing analysis in an antidumping duty investigation (see 2107150032). The appellate court found that Commerce had failed to meet certain statistical requirements before running the Cohen's d test (Stupp Corporation v. U.S., Fed. Cir. #2020-1857).

Plaintiffs China Custom Manufacturing and Greentec Engineering will appeal a December Court of International Trade ruling that found that certain solar roof mountings don't quality for the finished merchandise exclusion of the relevant antidumping and countervailing duty orders (see 2112070031). Per a Jan. 3 notice of appeal, the pair will take their case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. CIT Judge Stephen Vaden ruled that the mountings fall within the scope of the ADD/CVD orders on aluminum extrusions from China. He said the mountings in question are subassemblies and, as such, cannot be considered final goods to be defined under the finished merchandise exemption (China Custom Manufacturing Inc. v. U.S., CIT #20-00121).

The Commerce Department erred when it weight-averaged reported raw material premium costs (DIRMATMP) for all control numbers (CONNUMs) because that distorts their costs, antidumping duty respondent Assan Aluminyum Sanayi said in a Jan. 4 complaint at the Court of International Trade. The respondent further argued against Commerce's decisions to deduct the amount of Section 232 duties paid from its U.S. price, limit Assan's full duty drawback adjustment and treat certain management fees as indirect selling expenses (Assan Aluminyum Sanayi ve Ticaret v. U.S., CIT #21-00616).

CBP misclassified Mitsubishi Power America's supported selective catalytic reduction (SCR) catalysts, resulting in the entries wrongly being assessed Section 301 duties, the importer argued in a Jan. 4 complaint at the Court of International Trade. Instead, the supported SCR catalysts fit under a different Harmonized Tariff Schedule subheading that was granted an exclusion to the Section 301 China tariffs by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the importer said (Mitsubishi Power Americas v. U.S., CIT #21-00573).

The following lawsuits were recently filed at the Court of International Trade:

A group of domestic chloropicrin producers will appeal a November Court of International Trade decision that found that the Commerce Department didn't abuse its discretion when it denied the producers' bid to retroactively extend a filing deadline. According to the Jan. 3 notice of appeal, the chloropicrin producers -- Trinity Manufacturing, Ahsta Chemicals and Niklor Chemical Company -- will take their case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. In the decision, the trade court didn't buy the plaintiffs' excuses that the deadline was missed due to a combination of technical and medical issues. The court subsequently upheld Commerce's rejection of the extension requests following revocation of the relevant antidumping duty order because of the missed deadline (Trinity Manufacturing Inc., et al. v. U.S., CIT #20-03831).