Customs Law

In CIBA VISION Corporation v. United States, the Court of International Trade waded into one of those legal issues that I wonder about when my head is not occupied with more useful thoughts concerning beer and comic books. Specifically, the question of whether the meaning of a tariff term is a question of law or a question of fact. The case involves the tariff classification of something called Nelfilcon Polymer Solution, which is used in the production of disposable soft contact lenses. This material is made through the acetalization  of polyvinyl alcohol. You are on your own to figure out what that means (though I did provide a handy link). Apparently, after this process, the resulting material is 95% acetalized PVA (meaning Nelflicon) and used exclusively for molding into contact lenses. Customs treated the material as "Polymers of vinyl acetate or of other vinyl esters, in primary forms; other vinyl polymers in primary forms: Other: Other: Other (3905.99.80). CIBA prot...

The Court of International Trade, like all courts, sometimes puts on its collective professor's hat and does a little explicit teaching to the trade and, possibly, to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. I am not sure who was the intended audience for this lesson, but Telebrands Corp. v. United States is pretty explicit about the lesson for the day. The underlying issue in Telebrands is the classification of something known as the PedEgg pedicure set. This is one of America's great "As Seen On TV" products; just behind the pocket fisherman , the in-the-egg egg beater , and spray-on hair .  The PedEgg is similar to a cheese grater used to remove hard calloused skin from the foot. The genius of the PedEgg is that it conveniently collects the skin remnants inside the plastic egg shaped body. Important for our purposes, it also comes with two adhesive emery pads that are intended to be applied to the PedEgg body and used to finish the skin surface. ...

One might reasonably assume that if Customs and Border Protection sues a company in the United States Court of International Trade to collect a penalty and the defendant company never shows up to defend itself, that it would be a slam dunk for the U.S. Usually, it is not too difficult to get a default judgment. But, sometimes it is. That was the case in United States v. Active Frontier International, Inc. The case involved allegedly false declarations of origin on apparel imports. Customs asserted a penalty under section 592 of the Tariff Act of 1930 (19 USC 1592). AFI did not respond to the pre-penalty notice or the subsequent penalty notice. When it was sued in the Court of International Trade, AFI did not respond to the summons and complaint. That allowed the United States to seek a default judgment against AFI. The problem for the U.S. was that to collect a penalty, the United States needed to assert that AFI had made a material false statement or omission in connection with th...