The Court of International Trade will be moving its document filing and viewing system to the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) database on Oct. 1, according to a notice posted to its website and sent to current CM/ECF users. PACER is already used by all federal district, bankruptcy, and appeals courts. Current users of PACER will not have to re-register, but those without PACER accounts will have to get one (here).

Florida-based import/export company Exim-Brickell filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Florida Aug. 3, amid a lawsuit over melamine-contaminated powdered milk the company exported from China to Venezuela. The bankruptcy filing shows the company owes about $200 million to various creditors, but only has $300 in office supplies to its name. The milk was shipped during the 2008-09 scare over melamine contamination, after cost-cutting Chinese milk producers adulterated their milk with the kidney-damaging chemical to boost its apparent protein content.

The Court of International Trade affirmed CBP’s tariff classification of a packaging material used in military “Meals, Ready-to-Eat” (MREs) under a provision for plastics, despite its inclusion of a layer of aluminum foil. Alcan Food Packaging had contended the material should have instead been classified as aluminum foil, but the court said the plastic layers imparted the item’s essential character.

Raymond Chen was sworn in as a judge on the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit Aug. 5. Chen was formerly Deputy General Counsel for Intellectual Property Law and Solicitor at the Patent and Trademark Office from 2008 to 2013.

The Court of International Trade remanded the 2010-11 antidumping duty administrative review of frozen warmwater shrimp from Thailand (A-549-822), ordering the Commerce Department to reconsider its decision not to calculate an individual AD rate for Marine Gold Products Limited. Marine Gold hadn’t been selected as a mandatory respondent to the review, but had volunteered for review in the hopes of getting an individual AD rate. Commerce declined, citing the undue burden individual review of Marine Gold would place on the agency. But as it did in its July 2012 Grobest decision (see 12080205), the court held Commerce didn’t show that review of Marine Gold would be an “undue” burden beyond what is faced in a normal administrative review.

A Woodville, Wash.-based company and its owner pleaded guilty July 30 to violating the Arms Export Control Act and committing wire fraud by sending restricted information overseas. Precision Image Corporation and its owner, Chih-Kwang Hwa, contracted with the U.S. Navy to produce circuit boards. But instead, Precision Image hired a Taiwanese company to manufacture the circuit board, and illegally sent restricted information on how to produce them, said the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Washington. Precision Image faces a fine of up to $1 million, and Hwa up to 20 years in prison, although a plea agreement stipulates lesser penalties for each.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that most of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration hours-of-service (HOS) rules regarding commercial truck drivers may stand. The court did strike down an FMSCA rule that would have required short-haul drivers to take a 30-minute off-duty break. The American Trucking Associations brought the suit against the FMSCA (see 12021420). "While we are disappointed the Court chose to give unlimited deference to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s agenda-driving rulemaking, the striking down of the short-haul break provision is an important victory,” said Dave Osiecki, ATA senior vice president of policy and regulatory affairs, in a press release (here). "The court recognized on numerous occasions the shortcomings of the agency’s deliberations, so despite upholding most of the rule, we hope this opinion will serve as a warning to FMCSA not to rely on similarly unsubstantiated rulemakings in the future.”

Correction: Microsoft’s lawsuit against CBP enforcement of the International Trade Commission’s Section 337 limited exclusion order against Motorola was filed at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (see 13072301).

The Court of International Trade again rejected the Commerce Department’s reasoning for choosing Bangladesh as the “surrogate country” to value Camau Frozen Seafood’s labor input in the 2009-10 antidumping duty administrative review of frozen shrimp from Vietnam (A-552-802), again remanding the final results. CIT had first sent the case back in December (see 12111602). Commerce had once again explained that it used Bangladesh to value all of Camau’s other inputs, so using the same surrogate for the company’s labor input would avoid distortion. But the court said that wasn’t enough, because Commerce didn’t address arguments that the Bangladeshi labor data was itself distorted.

The Court of International Trade on July 31 sustained part of the subsidy rate calculated for Hyundai Hysco in the 2009 countervailing duty administrative review of corrosion-resistant carbon steel flat products from South Korea (C-580-818). Domestic company U.S. Steel challenged the interest rate benchmark used to determine the amount of subsidy Hysco received from a South Korean government loan program. The Commerce Department had compared an agency-constructed monthly average interest rate with the variable rate loan Hysco actually received. It eventually found the loan program to be not countervailable, because the benefit was de minimis. U.S. Steel said Commerce couldn’t use an “artificial” benchmark to value the subsidy. But CIT was “not convinced” that a constructed benchmark is necessarily artificial, and found Commerce’s actions were within agency discretion.