The following lawsuits were filed at the Court of International Trade during the week of May 4-10:
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.
Used clothing need not have fabric that is stressed or deteriorated from continued use to be classified as worn clothing in the tariff schedule, the Court of International Trade said in a May 6 decision that runs counter to more than two decades of CBP rulings and guidance on the subject.
Juice “bottle toppers” that depict the heads of popular children’s characters are classifiable in the tariff schedule as lids, not as toys, the Court of International Trade said in a May 5 decision. Good2Grow, the importer, argued that the bottle toppers are classifiable in a duty-free provision of Chapter 95, but CIT found that a note excluding kitchenware, tableware, bed linens and similar articles with utilitarian functions from classification in that chapter applies to all goods with a primarily utilitarian purpose, and not just festive articles.
The following lawsuits were filed at the Court of International Trade during the week of April 27 - May 3:
CBP reminded importers that they may request extensions of liquidation to preserve their right to refunds of sections 232 and 301 tariffs when liquidation is approaching but their requests for tariff exclusions are still pending, in a CSMS message sent May 1. “Given the potential retroactive application of Section 232 and Section 301 product exclusions, in situations where the importer has requested a product exclusion and the request is pending with the [Commerce Department] or [the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative], the importer or their licensed representative may submit a request to extend the liquidation of impacted unliquidated entry summaries to CBP,” CBP said.
The Department of Justice on April 17 filed an appeal of the Court of International Trade's decision that struck down CBP regulations to prohibit drawback claims for excise taxes. The appeal, which was docketed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on April 24, seeks to restore the agency's ban on substitution drawback on products that must pay excise taxes, such as alcohol and petroleum. The regulations deemed exportation without payment of excise taxes to be a form of drawback, and limited the amount of drawback to the amount of taxes paid (and not previously refunded) on the export that forms the basis for the drawback claim.
The following lawsuits were filed at the Court of International Trade during the week of April 20-26:
The Court of International Trade is lifting a now-moot injunction banning imports from Mexican fisheries that rely on practices that threaten the vaquita with extinction, it said in a decision issued April 22. The Natural Resources Defense Council voluntarily moved to dismiss the case after the National Marine Fisheries Service -- in a reversal from the nearly two-year defense mounted by the government -- implemented a ban even further reaching than the advocacy group had sought via its lawsuit (see 2003050043). The injunction had been in place since July 2018 (see 1807260039). Noting the date that his ruling was issued -- Earth Day -- CIT Judge Gary Katzmann called for even more “vigorous international enforcement” against continued threats to the vaquita. “The panda of the sea, the little cow, cannot be replaced,” he concluded the decision, and the case.
Cedar shakes and shingles are not covered by antidumping and countervailing duties on softwood lumber from Canada, the Court of International Trade ruled April 20 as it sustained a court-ordered rewrite of a Commerce Department scope ruling from 2018. Commerce had originally found the cedar shakes and shingles were subject to AD/CV duties (see 1810110040), but CIT had overturned that ruling in November 2019 (see 1911140048), finding the agency had failed to consider its previous scope treatment of cedar shakes and shingles under a series of previous AD/CV duty orders on softwood lumber. Commerce came back with a finding that the cedar shakes and shingles are out of scope, in part because of scope rulings under those previous AD/CV duty orders, and also because it unearthed language in the original petition for AD/CV duties that says cedar shakes and shingles were not intended to be covered by the AD/CV duty orders.
The following lawsuits were filed at the Court of International Trade during the week of April 13-19: