The following lawsuits were filed at the Court of International Trade during the week of Dec. 7-13:
Court of International Trade
The United States Court of International Trade is a federal court which has national jurisdiction over civil actions regarding the customs and international trade laws of the United States. The Court was established under Article III of the Constitution by the Customs Courts Act of 1980. The Court consists of nine judges appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate and is located in New York City. The Court has jurisdiction throughout the United States and has exclusive jurisdictional authority to decide civil action pertaining to international trade against the United States or entities representing the United States.
The Court of International Trade and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit recently paved the way for an importer of Turkish steel to get Section 232 tariff refunds on Turkish steel paid as a result of a tariff increase in 2018, though CIT declined a request to compel immediate payment of the refunds.
The following lawsuits were filed at the Court of International Trade during the week of Nov. 30 - Dec. 6:
Importers must file protests to preserve their rights to Section 301 tariff exclusions issued after an entry has already liquidated, the Department of Justice said in a motion to dismiss a pair of lawsuits that seek to have the exclusions applied past the protest deadline. CBP’s failure to apply the exclusions was a protestable event, even if the exclusions did not exist at the time, and the Court of International Trade’s jurisdictional scheme means CIT can’t hear cases wherein the importer skipped the protest scheme, DOJ said.
Lawyers for importers that have filed suit under the extensive ongoing Section 301 litigation have established an “informal” steering committee to manage the case, law firm Neville Peterson said in a Dec. 1 blog post, adding that the committee “confers with some regularity.” Most observers expect the U.S. Court of International Trade will pick the first-filed Section 301 complaint from HMTX Industries and Jasco Production as the lead case, and stay the roughly 3,700 other actions while HMTX is litigated, the law firm said.
The Court of International Trade on Dec. 1 sent an Enforce and Protect Act (EAPA) evasion determination back down to CBP for reconsideration, finding the agency failed to properly disclose information to the accused that it relied on to find the importer guilty of evasion. CBP’s regulations require the agency to make available public summaries of any redacted or business confidential information on the record of an EAPA investigation, but CBP did not do so during a proceeding involving Royal Brush Manufacturing, a pencil importer alleged to have transshipped Chinese pencils through the Philippines to avoid antidumping duties, CIT said.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit granted the Commerce Department a wide berth to apply antidumping and countervailing duties to goods packaged alongside nonsubject merchandise, in a Nov. 30 decision that provoked a dissent from the appeals court’s only judge with a background in trade.
The following lawsuits were filed at the Court of International Trade during the week of Nov. 23-29:
Just as the recent flood of Section 301 litigation had appeared to slow to a trickle, importers added more than two dozen more lawsuits last week to the multitude of cases currently before the Court of International Trade. But while the new complaints restate the same arguments made by thousands of other plaintiffs in the sprawling litigation, many of the new cases differ in that they seek to invalidate only List 4 tariffs, excluding List 3 from the requests.
The following lawsuits were filed at the Court of International Trade during the week of Nov. 16-22: