The Labor Department unlawfully relied on unverified statements from AT&T officials when denying a unionized group of former AT&T call workers trade adjustment assistance, the Court of International Trade said in a Jan. 5 opinion. Sending the decision back to Labor a second time, Judge Miller Baker said the department can't claim to have verified email communications with AT&T's in-house counsel based only on AT&T knowing the most about its business operations.
A clear reading of the law allows for an importer to bring in goods deemed "drug paraphernalia" federally if they are legal at the state level, Washington-based importer Keirton USA told the Court of International Trade in its Jan. 5 motion for judgment. Seeking to get back its imports of cannabis processors from CBP, Keirton told the trade court that the exemption allowing for the import of drug paraphernalia where it is legal at the state level is "plain and unambiguous and must be applied accordingly" (Keirton USA, Inc. v. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, CIT #21-00452).
No lawsuits have been filed recently at the Court of International Trade.
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).
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 Commerce Department found in Jan. 4 remand results that dual-stenciled standard pipe and line pipe aren't to be included within the scope of the antidumping duty order on circular welded carbon steel pipes and tubes from Thailand. Flipping its position following remand instructions from the Court of International Trade, Commerce nonetheless expressed a series of reservations over its decision to do so, dubbing the remand order "problematic."
The following lawsuits were recently filed at the Court of International Trade:
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).