The following trade-related lawsuits were recently filed at the Court of International Trade:
U.S. District Judge Stanley Bastian for Eastern Washington in Richland denied T-Mobile’s motion to dismiss a negligence case and stay discovery, said his signed order Tuesday (docket 4:23-cv-05166) calling the carrier’s motion to stay discovery “premature.” It’s the court’s practice to deny initial motions to dismiss with leave to renew and grant plaintiffs leave to file an amended complaint to cure any deficiencies alleged by defendants, the order said. Plaintiff Jane Doe alleged in her November complaint (see 2312070039) that a T-Mobile employee downloaded, without her consent, private images and videos from a cellphone she traded in at a T-Mobile store in a Washington mall.
The Court of International Trade on Jan. 16 vacated its judgment in a customs case brought by Jing Mei Automotive (USA) under the court's Rule 60(a), which allows the court to correct clerical mistakes or mistakes stemming from oversight or omission. The judgment denied Jing Mei's motion for summary judgment and addressed four different categories of the importer's car parts. The court's Jan. 16 order didn't identify the clerical error (Jing Mei Automotive (USA) v. United States, CIT # 13-00321).
The Court of International Trade on Jan. 25 said importer Fraserview Remanufacturing Inc. didn't need a protest to file suit at the trade court for its entries that were erroneously deemed liquidated while liquidation was suspended. Judge Timothy Reif said that because the statute for deemed liquidation requires the that entries not be suspended, CBP's notices of deemed liquidation didn't operate to actually liquidate the entries.
A recent 5th U.S. Circuit Appeals Court ruling relied on the same line of cases that Amazon and other defendants cited in support of their motions to dismiss the FTC’s case alleging violation of the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act, said defendants’ filing (docket 2:23-cv-00932) Monday in U.S. District Court for Western Washington in Seattle. In their notice of supplemental authority relating to their motions to dismiss the FTC's amended complaint, the defendants cited the 5th Circuit’s Jan. 8 ruling in Commodity Futures Trading Commission v. EOX Holdings, in which the court reversed a civil-liability finding in favor of the plaintiff because “the Defendants lacked fair notice of the CFTC’s unprecedented interpretation” of a CFTC rule, said the notice. In that case, the CFTC argued that the rule’s “‘controlling plain language’ provided ‘fair notice’ to the public,” the notice said. The 5th Circuit reversed a lower court's ruling, holding that the rule was “at best ambiguous” and “did not give fair notice to the Defendants absent further guidance from the FTC.” The EOX case is relevant to arguments in Amazon’s motion that “fair notice” standards apply only “if a court ‘must defer to an agency interpretation of a statute or regulation’ ... or the agency itself is acting as the adjudicator,” the notice said. The FTC alleges Amazon used “manipulative, coercive, or deceptive user-interface designs,” or dark patterns, to trick consumers into enrolling in automatically renewing Prime subscriptions, it said. The company “knowingly complicated” the Prime cancellation process, said the complaint.
No trade-related lawsuits were recently filed at the Court of International Trade.
Importer Hanon Systems Alabama dismissed at the Court of International Trade on Jan. 22 its lawsuit challenging the Commerce Department's finding that it's circumventing the antidumping and countervailing duty orders on aluminum foil from China by way of South Korea and Thailand (Hanon Systems Alabama Corp. v. United States, CIT # 23-00269).
A South Korean aluminum foil importer filed suit at the Court of International Trade against an anti-circumvention inquiry that found multiple importers attempted to avoid antidumping duties on Chinese aluminum foil using intermediaries in South Korea (Hanon Systems Alabama v. U.S., CIT # 23-00269).
Past evidence of antidumping and countervailing duty evasion doesn't mean an exporter must still be transshipping goods, the U.S. said Jan. 22 in response to an AD/CVD petitioner’s motion for summary judgment in a case challenging the Commerce Department’s determination that wooden cabinet importers were not attempting to evade AD/CVD orders on products from China (American Kitchen Cabinet Alliance v. U.S., CIT # 23-00140).
The U.S. moved to dismiss a complaint from solar cell maker Auxin Solar and solar module designer Concept Clean Energy at the Court of International Trade challenging the Commerce Department's pause of antidumping and countervailing duties on solar cells and modules from Southeast Asian countries found to be circumventing the AD/CVD orders on these goods from China (Auxin Solar v. United States, CIT # 23-00274).