Opinion ID: 777073
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Plate Orders Issue in 1993.

Text: 6 In the early 1990s, Bethlehem Steel and the other Defendant-Intervenors in this case filed petitions with officials of the Commerce Department asking that they investigate and issue antidumping and countervailing duty orders against certain cut-to-length steel imported into the United States from Germany. As with all such petitions filed with Commerce, Bethlehem Steel and the other domestic steel producers alleged that companies were importing and selling steel from Germany below cost and were thereby causing material harm to domestic steel sellers. 7 In their petitions, the Defendant-Intervenors did not specifically identify profile slab, much less the profile slab exported by the German company Reiner Brach, as a product that fell within the scope of its petitions. In the section entitled Scope of Investigation and Description of the Merchandise, the petitions instead refer to the dimensional characteristics of the steel covered by the requested Orders, as well as to definitions from the American Iron and Steel Institute product categories and the American Society for Testing and Materials standards specification numbers. On one page, the petitions also refer to and quote (in a footnote) the definition of flat-rolled products according to the Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States. (J.A. 88 n. 5) (quoting HTSUS, Chapter 72, Note 1(k)). Generally, however, the six pages devoted to the respective petitions' description of merchandise define the type of steel at issue with little reference to the HTSUS. 8 On the last page of this section, the petitions do list certain products according to the HTSUS classification numbers that the Customs Service had assigned to them. As the petitions themselves stated, products with these HTSUS numbers were covered by [these] Petition[s]. The classification number HTSUS 7207 — the number later assigned to Novosteel's imported profile slab — does not appear among them. 9 In August 1993, the Commerce Department, having investigated the Defendant-Intervenors' petitions, went ahead and issued both antidumping and countervailing duty orders directed to the importation of cut-to-length carbon steel plate from Germany. The two orders, called the Plate Orders, defined the products that they covered as: 10 Certain hot-rolled carbon steel flat-rolled products in straight lengths, of rectangular shape, hot rolled, neither clad, plated, nor coated with metal, whether or not painted, varnished, or coated with plastics or other nonmetallic substances, 4.75 millimeters or more in thickness and of a width which exceeds 150 millimeters and measures at least twice the thickness.... 11 58 Fed. Reg. 43,756, 43,758 (Aug. 17, 1993); 58 Fed. Reg. 44,170 (Aug. 19, 1993) (emphasis added). As with the earlier petitions, the Plate Orders did not list HTSUS 7207 as one of the products that they covered. The Orders did state, however, that the listing of classification numbers did not alone determine whether any particular product fell within their scope: Although the Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States ... subheadings are provided for convenience and customs purposes, our written descriptions of the scope of these proceedings are dispositive.  Id. (emphasis added). 12