Opinions

This morning the Federal Circuit issued a precedential opinion vacating a decision of the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims for lack of jurisdiction, a precedential opinion in a trade case, and a nonprecedential opinion affirming a decision of the Merit Systems Protection Board. Here are the introductions to the opinions.

Tadlock v. McDonough (Precedential)

This case presents the question of whether and to what extent the United States Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims (“Veterans Court”) may make findings of fact in the course of considering whether an error of the Board of Veterans Appeals (“Board”) was prejudicial. Because the Veterans Court’s jurisdiction to consider prejudicial error does not give it the right to make de novo findings of fact or otherwise resolve matters that are open to debate, we vacate the Veterans Court’s determination that Howard L. Tadlock, Jr. (“Tadlock”) is not entitled to presumptive service connection and remand for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

Stupp Corp. v. United States (Precedential)

Appellant SeAH Steel Corporation appeals from a decision of the Court of International Trade (“the Trade Court”) affirming a final determination of the United States Department of Commerce in an antidumping duty investigation. In that investigation, Commerce assessed SeAH a weighted average dumping margin above the de minimis threshold, which subjected SeAH to antidumping duties. SeAH challenges Commerce’s rejection of portions of SeAH’s case brief and various aspects of the analysis Commerce used to derive the dumping margin. We affirm with respect to the case brief issue and with respect to most of SeAH’s challenges to Commerce’s analysis. We vacate and remand, however, on the issue of whether it was reasonable for Commerce to apply a portion of its analysis— specifically, the “Cohen’s test”—to sales data that may have been of insufficient size, not normally distributed, and lacking roughly equal variances.

Staley v. Department of Veterans Affairs

Shasta D. Staley appeals from a final decision of the Merit Systems Protection Board (Board) denying her request for corrective action by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) for a personnel action prohibited under the Whistleblower Protection Act, as amended by the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act of 2012, Pub. L. No. 112-199, 126 Stat. 1465. Staley v. Dep’t of Veterans Affairs, No. DC-1221-19-0639-W-1, 2020 WL 1983454 (Apr. 20, 2020) (Board Decision). For the reasons discussed, we affirm.