President Donald Trump didn't clearly misconstrue the statute when he revoked a Section 201 tariff exclusion on bifacial solar panels, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled on Nov. 13. Granting the president wider discretion to make modifications to Section 201 duties, Judges Alan Lourie, Richard Taranto and Leonard Stark said that the statute -- Section 2254(b)(1)(B) of the Trade Act of 1930 -- allows for trade-restricting modifications, as opposed to only trade-liberalizing ones.

The Court of International Trade on Nov. 8 upheld a Commerce Department scope ruling that importer Valeo North America's T-series aluminum sheet is covered by the antidumping and countervailing duty orders on common alloy aluminum sheet from China. Judge Mark Barnett sustained Commerce's consideration of and weight applied to various industry evidence along with its detailed discussion of heat treatment.

The Commerce Department erroneously used Malaysian tariff schedule subheading 4402.90.1000 as the surrogate value for coal-based carbonized materials in an antidumping review of activated carbon instead of the broader Harmonized System subheading 4402.90, exporters Carbon Activated Tianjin Co. and Carbon Activated Corp. argued. Filing their opening brief at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the exporters said Commerce's decision was based on "inaccurate and unsupported factual findings" (Carbon Activated Tianjin Co. v. U.S., Fed. Cir. # 23-2135).

The Commerce Department arbitrarily rejected arguments from Canadian softwood lumber exporter Resolute FP Canada -- despite a "good cause" showing by Resolute -- when it found the company would be likely to continue dumping, in the final results of a sunset review, Resolute said in its Nov. 6 motion for judgment at the Court of International Trade (Resolute FP Canada v. U.S., CIT # 23-00095).

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Judges at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit questioned antidumping duty petitioner Wheatland Tube Co. and respondent Saha Thai Steel Pipe Public Co. during a Nov. 7 oral argument over Wheatland's claim that a Commerce Department scope ruling improperly excluded dual-stenciled pipe from the AD order on circular welded carbon steel pipes and tubes from Thailand (Saha Thai Steel Pipe Public Co. v. United States, Fed. Cir. # 22-2181).

CBP abused its discretion by ignoring explicit antidumping and countervailing duty scope language when it found that importer and AD/CVD petitioner Pitts Enterprises evaded the AD/CVD orders on chassis and subassemblies thereof from China, Pitts argued in a Nov. 6 complaint at the Court of International Trade. The importer admitted to integrating Chinese axle and landing gear leg components into finished chassis shipments, which were finished in Vietnam, but it said individual Chinese components were "explicitly removed from the scope" (Pitts Enterprises v. U.S., CIT # 23-00234).

The Commerce Department continued to find that India was the appropriate primary surrogate country in its 16th administrative review of the antidumping duty order on certain frozen fish fillets from Vietnam, it said in remand results filed Nov. 6 at the Court of International Trade (Catfish Farmers of America v. U.S., CIT # 21-00380)

The "true nature" of a case brought by Turkish exporter Eregli Demir ve Celik Fabrikalari (Erdemir) is to challenge the International Trade Commission's finding on non-negligiblity in the underlying antidumping duty investigation on hot-rolled steel from Turkey, despite Erdemir's insistance that the challenge is to the ITC's decision not to hold a reconsideration proceeding, a group of defendant-intervenors led by Cleveland-Cliffs said in their Nov. 3 reply at the Court of International Trade (Eregli Demir ve Celik Fabrikalari v. U.S. International Trade Commission, CIT # 22-00349).

The U.S. addressed all three of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's concerns regarding the Commerce Department's use of the Cohen's d test to find "masked" dumping in antidumping duty proceedings, the government told the appellate court. Submitting its reply brief on Nov. 6 in the lead case on Commerce's use of the test, the U.S. claimed that data sets with non-normal distribution "do not inevitably lead to inaccurate results," the ratio test used as part of its differential pricing analysis accounts for data sets with small amounts of numbers and the test runs effectively involving data sets with small variance (Stupp Corp. v. United States, Fed. Cir. # 23-1663).