CAFC Need Not Consider 2 Lower Court Opinions in Aluminum Extrusion Scope Case, Appellee Tells CAFC
Two Court of International Trade decisions cited by plaintiff-appellants in a scope case as supplemental authorities need not be considered by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, defendant-appellee Aluminum Extrusions Fair Trade Committee said in a Jan. 4 letter to the appellate court. The CIT decisions are not "pertinent and significant" because they are "not binding on this court" and "are simply further decisions from the same dissenting judge" at the trade court, the appellee said (China Custom Manufacturing v. U.S., Fed. Cir. # 22-1345).
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
The case concerns China Custom Manufacturing's scope request for its Rock-It 3.0 solar roof mountings. Made with aluminum extrusion parts, the products are used to mount solar panels on a roof and with other parts of the plaintiffs' EcoFasten RockIt System 3.0. Since the antidumping and countervailing duty orders on aluminum extrusions from China were issued in 2011, Commerce's interpretation of the scope of the orders has evolved.
The agency originally found the roof mounts qualified for the finished merchandise exclusion of the orders because they required no further assembly. However, during that same year, the agency revised the way it finds whether a good qualifies as finished merchandise. The new policy found that its old interpretation of the exclusion could "inadvertently expand the scope of the order," so it changed the exclusion's requirements to require a good to include all the downstream products.
Two Federal Circuit cases shored up this interpretation, eventually determining that a good found to be a subassembly cannot qualify for the finished merchandise exclusion. It was under this standard that Commerce made its scope ruling now subject to litigation. The appellants, CCM and Greentec Engineering, said that two CIT decisions in Columbia Aluminum Products v. U.S. and Worldwide Door Components v. U.S. upheld Commerce's decisions to exclude the importers' door thresholds with aluminum extrusions from the scope of the orders on aluminum extrusions as finished merchandise (see 2212190051).
CCM and Greentec said these opinions are relevant for the present appeal since they "foreclose Commerce considering subassemblies provision and finished merchandise exclusion to be mutually exclusive" (see 2301040026). However, the Aluminum Extrusions Fair Trade Committee said the opinions are irrelevant and apply the wrong standard. The present case properly applied the Federal Circuit's precedent in affirming Commerce's finding that CCM's solar mounts are "subassemblies" and cannot be excluded as "finished merchandise."