The Court of International Trade heard oral argument last week on the government's motion for alternative service in a customs penalty case against German paper exporter Koehler Oberkirch. The U.S. claimed that it was proper to serve Koehler via its U.S. counsel, attorneys at Holland and Knight, while the exporter said the government should have sought service through "diplomatic channels" (U.S. v. Koehler Oberkirch GmbH, CIT # 24-00014).

Litigants in a pair of cases at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit jumped on the U.S. Supreme Court's move last week to axe the principle of agency deference when interpreting ambiguous statutes (see 2406280051). In notices of supplemental authority, two importers told the appellate court that the Court of International Trade relied on the now-defunct Chevron deference standard.

The government is attempting to argue that it has the discretion to decide what antidumping and countervailing duty orders mean regardless of those orders’ plain language, pipe fitting petitioners argued July 1 (NORCA Industrial Company, LLC v. U.S., CIT Consol. # 23-00231).

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Refraining from joining exporters’ June 13 submission to the Court of International Trade (see 2406140059), a plaintiff-intervenor importer filed its own motion for judgment making similar arguments against Commerce’s finding that Thai solar panel exporters had circumvented an antidumping duty order on solar panels from China (Canadian Solar International Limited v. U.S., CIT # 23-00222).

The U.S. on July 1 urged the Court of International Trade to dismiss customs broker Seko Customs Brokerage's suit contesting CBP's suspension of the company from participation in the Entry Type 86 pilot and Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism program. The government said Seko's claims aren't ripe for judicial review, are moot and are premature (Seko Customs Brokerage v. U.S., CIT # 24-00097).

In Court of International Trade oral arguments June 25, a judge questioned both parties as to the reason that the Commerce Department made an allegedly ex parte visit to a domestic competitor while it was in the process of reaching a scope ruling on an importer’s ceramic tile (see 2402010046) (Elysium Tiles v. U.S., CIT # 23-00041).

The Supreme Court of the U.S. on June 28 overturned a hallmark of administrative law that had stood for four decades: the court's principle of deferring to federal agencies' interpretation of ambiguous statutes established in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council.

The Court of International Trade sustained the Commerce Department's decision to pick a secondary mandatory respondent in an antidumping review despite temporal limits on the selection process. However, Judge Mark Barnett sent back the agency's methodology for picking the respondent due to its failure to explain its removal of Shandong Linglong Tyre Co. from the list of eligible exporters.

The Commerce Department on June 26 called an importer’s claim that it could have double-counted industry support for an antidumping investigation “misplaced,” saying that double-counting wasn’t possible normally under the department's calculation method and that there was no evidence U.S. producers had “literally counted each ton of pipe they produced twice” (Tenaris Bay City v. U.S., CIT # 22-00343).