AD Petitioner, Respondent Spar on Loper Bright's Impact on Affiliation Statute in AD Case

Antidumping duty petitioner Ventura Coastal and respondent Louis Dreyfus Company Sucos traded briefs on the impact and relevance the Supreme Court's recent decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which eliminated the Chevron principle of deferring to agencies' interpretations of ambiguous statutes (Ventura Coastal v. United States, CIT # 23-00009).

Ventura brought the suit to claim that the Commerce Department improperly found that Louis Dreyfus Co. wasn't affiliated with its main fresh lemon supplier, leading to a de minimis rate for the company in the AD investigation on Brazilian lemon juice. In light of Loper Bright (see 2406280051), the petitioner said the decision means the Court of International Trade doesn't need to adhere to Commerce's interpretation of 19 U.S.C. Section 1677(33), which defines "affiliation between parties" (see 2407030066).

In a supplemental brief, Ventura said Commerce doesn't have the "authority to give meaning" to the terms of the law. While Congress gave the agency "some rulemaking authority" under the Uruguay Round Agreements Act, it didn't give Commerce the "authority to give meaning to the terms of the URAA," the brief said. Instead, the court itself should interpret the terms, particularly the terms "partners" and "close supplier relationship," Ventura claimed.

Commerce narrowed the term "partners" to mean "only those who own something in common or engage in a joint selling activity -- without reference to any legal authority," Ventura argued, claiming that this definition is "unreasonably narrow and unsupportable." The Statement of Administrative Action defines a "close supplier relationship" as one where the supplier or buyer becomes reliant on the other.

Due to this definition and the evidence that Louis Dreyfus Co. was legally barred from owning or leasing land to grow lemons and could only do so through its supplier, Commerce violated the statute by finding that the respondent wasn't affiliated with its supplier, Ventura said.

Meanwhile, Louis Dreyfus Co. said "Loper Bright should not alter the outcome of the Court's analysis in this case," since the decision merely tells the judiciary to "fix" the boundaries of an agency's statutory interpretation and not to interpret the law itself.

Here, Congress gave Commerce the authority to give meaning to the law's terms "through its enactment of the" URAA, the company said. The URAA "gives Commerce both the general authority to issue such regulations as may be necessary to ensure that the provisions of the URAA are implemented, and the specific authority" to define the statute's terms via the inclusion of the "affiliated persons" definition explained in the SAA, the brief said.

Louis Dreyfus Co. also invoked the Supreme Court's separate deferential standard in Skidmore v. Swift & Co., which establishes deference owed to an agency's "body of experience and informed judgment" when interpreting a law. As a result, the court should take note of Commerce's consistent interpretation of the "affiliated persons' definition through partnership ... to require more than a mere contractual agreement."

The exporter lastly claimed that Commerce's interpretation of the statute is the "single, best meaning" of the law, since "Congress clearly did not intend to include all possible meanings of the term 'partners' in their definition of affiliated persons." Instead, the legislature only meant to include the "definition that is most relevant to the issue (e.g., entities sharing joint ownership or engaging in joint selling activities)," the brief said.