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Showing posts from November, 2011

Ford, Horizon & Cisco (Pun-based Title TBA)

The last month has been extremely busy and December does not look to be any less so. Consequently, you are about to get the shortest court decision summaries possible. Catch me in January, when it looks like I will have more breathing room, and I will do better. Ford Motor Company v. United States Ford, which is rapidly becoming the go-to litigant for interesting issues, challenged Customs' denial of a post-entry NAFTA claim in which it had failed to provide NAFTA certificates. The Court of International Trade dismissed Ford's challenge on the grounds that it failed to properly make the claim and, therefore, the Court lacked jurisdiction. The Federal Circuit reversed (see this prior post ) holding that the lack of a NAFTA certificate was not jurisdictional. Rather, the Court had jurisdiction and the question to be decided was whether the claim was properly made. On remand , the CIT had to decide whether Customs and Border Protection properly denied the post-entry claim. A

Hitachi: Shall = Should

Sometimes, people complain that lawyers can't speak or write in simple English. Usually, I am sympathetic to this complaint. But, there are time when lawyer language has to be complicated to anticipate and avoid later arguments about what some text means. If your argument in a contract dispute is "We all know I was not supposed to paint the house in the rain," but you can't point to that in the contract, you are in a weak (but not untenable) position. If you have a contract that covers when, how, and in what conditions you are supposed to paint, it will be easier to resolve the dispute. So, up to a point, legalese has a place. Hitachi Home Products is all about how courts grapple with bad drafting and important points left out of laws. Here is the regulation relating to how Customs and Border Protection is supposed to decide protests (19 CFR 174.21): Except [for protests relating to exclusions], the port director shall review and act on a protest filed in accordan

Airflow Remand: Worth Reading

Airflow Technologies is one of my favorite cases of the past few years. In it, the Federal Circuit reversed the Court of International Trade and held that the tariff description "straining cloth" in HTSUS heading 5911 only applies to cloth used for straining solid particles from liquids. Whatever clearing the air or other gases of particulates may be called, it is not straining. The Federal Circuit remanded to the Court of International Trade for additional consideration. The CIT has now issued its remand decision , and it is interesting. Filter media is complicated to classify for two reasons. First, the media itself can be made of various materials from paper to fiber glass to textiles. Second, the imported product is often not just the media but the media housed or supported in some way. Think about a basic furnace filter as an example. Although everyone calls those things "furnace filters," Customs and Border Protection tends to think of them as the just the