The Court of International Trade struck down the U.S. Trade Representative's attempt to withdraw an exclusion on bifacial solar panels from the Section 201 safeguard measures on solar cells in a Nov. 17 decision. Judge Gary Katzmann found that USTR lacked the statutory authority to withdraw the exclusion. The opinion is the second in as many days over the Trump administration's termination of the exclusion, following a Nov. 16 decision that struck down the presidential proclamation issued after CIT imposed a preliminary injunction on USTR's action.

The Court of International Trade on Nov. 16 ruled against President Donald Trump's decision to revoke an exclusion for bifacial panels from Section 201 safeguard duties on solar cells. The trade court ruled his proclamation revoking the exclusion, issued in the midst of litigation over a similar action previously taken by the U.S. Trade Representative, was a "clear misconstruction" of the law and amounted to action outside the president's authority. The court said that the law only permits the president to make "trade-liberalizing modifications" to existing safeguards.

The Court of International Trade rejected a group of domestic chloropicrin producers' bid to overturn the Commerce Department's revocation of the antidumping duty order on chloropicrin from China. The order was revoked because no party timely responded to the notice of a five-year review of the order. Commerce repeatedly denied the plaintiffs' bid to retroactively extend the deadline to reply to the initiation notice. In the Nov. 8 opinion, Judge Timothy Stanceu said that Commerce did not abuse its discretion in doing so, since there were no "extraordinary circumstances" that caused the delayed filings.

CBP didn't violate diamond sawblade importer Diamond Tool Technology's due process rights when it found that the importer evaded the antidumping duties on the sawblades from China under the Enforce and Protect Act, the Court of International Trade said in an Oct. 29 ruling, made public Nov. 5. However, the court did remand the actual evasion finding back to CBP, having found DTT wasn't required to report "that its diamond sawblades assembled in Thailand consisted of Chinese-origin cores and segments." The court also upheld CBP's finding that DTT's entries that pre-dated the start date of the evasion inquiry are "covered merchandise."

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit remanded in part and sustained in part the Court of International Trade's opinion in a Nov. 3 decision amid a customs battle over bicycle seats. The Federal Circuit found the trade court erred in approving CBP's use of "bypass entries" to show the established classification treatment of the bicycle seat imports. However, the three-judge panel at the Federal Circuit upheld CIT's finding of no de facto established and uniform practice. The plaintiff, Kent International, had argued that such a practice existed based on CBP's liquidation of its entries, and the entries of third parties, under its preferred Harmonized Tariff Schedule subheading.

The Court of International Trade sustained CBP's finding that Royal Brush Manufacturing Inc. evaded antidumping duties on cased pencils from China through the Philippines in an Oct. 29 order. Chief Judge Mark Barnett found that CBP complied with the law and the court's remand instructions by providing sufficient public summaries of the confidential information in the evasion investigation. Royal Brush unsuccessfully claimed that the public summaries were not adequate and that this violated its due process rights. Barnett rejecting Royal Brush's challenges to CBP's decision to reject its verification report and CBP's alternative reliance on adverse inferences.

The Court of International Trade sustained on Oct. 27 the Commerce Department's second remand results in a case over the sixth administrative review of the antidumping duty order on diamond sawblades and parts thereof from China. Judge Claire Kelly upheld Commerce's use of adverse facts available when weighing respondent Bosun Tool's country of origin information using a first-in, first-out methodology, despite Bosun's full cooperation. Kelly also rejected Bosun's argument that if AFA were to be applied, the scope of its application should be limited to the missing country of origin information for the FIFO sales, holding instead that Commerce reasonably found that, without reliable country of origin information, the agency could not accurately pair price data in the U.S. sales database with the correct country of origin.

The Court of International Trade on Oct. 22 sustained the Commerce Department's remand results in a case over the 11th administrative review of the antidumping duty order on activated carbon from China. Chief Judge Mark Barnett upheld Commerce's decision to pick Malaysia over Romania as the primary surrogate country in the review, despite the fact that Commerce used the financial statements from a Romanian company to calculate the surrogate financial ratios. Barnett also sustained Commerce's surrogate value selections for bituminous coal, an input of activated carbon, and the agency's financial ratio calculations.

The Court of International Trade on Oct. 22 remanded in part and sustained in part the Commerce Department's final determination in the antidumping duty investigation on utility scale wind towers from Canada. Judge Jennifer Choe-Groves sustained Commerce's decision to weight-average plate costs, use respondent Marmen's invoice dates as the date of sale, use reported sales of tower sections and not apply facts otherwise available. The judge remanded, however, Commerce's decision to reject Marmen's additional cost reconciliation information and use the average-to-transaction methodology when identifying masked dumping.

The Court of International Trade issued two opinions in antidumping cases, one sustaining the Commerce Department's remand results, and another remanding certain issues back to the agency. The first decision concerned a challenge brought by Husteel to the 2016-17 administrative review of the antidumping duty order on circular welded non-alloy steel pipe from South Korea. As it has done many times before, the court had initially remanded Commerce's decision to make a particular market situation adjustment to Husteel's sales-below-cost test. Judge Jennifer Choe-Groves said this adjustment is not permissible under the law, so Commerce dropped it under protest, leading the judge to sustain the remand.