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

Heading: Antidumping/Countervailing Duty Orders and the HTSUS.

Text: 36 Liberally construing Novosteel's argument about the allegedly unambiguous scope of the Orders, we also conclude that the petitions' omission of the HTSUS number assigned to Reiner Brach profile slab does not strengthen Novosteel's appeal. As stated above, Novosteel claimed before the Court of International Trade that the petitions requesting the Plate Orders spoke of the relevant steel product in HTSUS nomenclature; and thus, the argument goes, the listings of the HTSUS classification numbers in the petitions actually defined the entire realm of products covered by the Plate Orders. 37 This argument fails for several reasons. For one thing, as the Court of International Trade explained, the petitions hardly defined the scope of the products in terms of the HTSUS; rather, they described the products covered by the Orders using dimensional criteria and references to non-HTSUS sources, e.g., definitions from the American Iron and Steel Institute and the American Society for Testing and Materials, in addition to references to the HTSUS. The HTSUS references, in other words, by no means dominated the petition so as to make that petition synonymous with the HTSUS listings themselves. The Plate Orders themselves make this point clear, saying that they were providing the HTSUS listings for convenience and customs purposes only and that the petitions' description of the merchandise still controlled the Orders' scope. 38 Our precedent has likewise indicated, meanwhile, that a reference to an HTSUS number is not dispositive about the scope of an antidumping or countervailing-duty order. See Smith Corona, 915 F.2d at 687. So too has the precedent from the Court of International Trade. See Wirth, 5 F.Supp.2d at 977-78 (The inclusion of various HTSUS headings in a petition ordinarily should not be interpreted to exclude merchandise ... classified under an HTSUS heading not listed in the petition.), aff'd, 185 F.3d 882 (Fed.Cir. Feb. 2, 1999) (Table). We have no reason to now cast aside those precedents as something less than controlling in this case. 39 At the same time, we recognize that one of the applicable regulations does state that petitions must contain (among other things) a detailed description of the subject merchandise that defines the requested scope of the investigation, including... its current U.S. tariff classification number.  19 C.F.R. § 351.202(b)(5) (emphasis added). But as the Court of International Trade also implied, that regulation does not in turn say that the failure to include a particular HTSUS number within a petition means the resulting Order will likewise exclude the product that is designated under that particular HTSUS classification number. Compare Wirth, 5 F.Supp.2d at 977 (rejecting argument that the regulations required a dispositive listing of all HTSUS numbers and concluding that the HTSUS list alone did not constitute the entirety of products covered by the petition or the order that followed). More important, Novosteel has not challenged the court's implicit interpretation of the regulation as either erroneous or as somehow offending (or exceeding) the statute from which it derives. We see no reason to make the argument for them. Further, we doubt that any argument to that effect would survive close scrutiny, given again that the regulations also contemplate the need to draft the scope of these orders in general terms. See 19 C.F.R. § 351.225(a). 40