In Re US (CIT Confidentiality)
Authored by: Jeremy J. Gustrowsky
The Federal Circuit dismissed an appeal over the disclosure of allegedly confidential business information, ruling that the case was moot because the information had already been public for over two years. The case, decided alongside a companion matter, centered on whether the Court of International Trade (CIT) improperly released business proprietary information in a published opinion involving antidumping duties on mattresses.
The dispute originated from a trade proceeding in which the International Trade Commission found that the U.S. mattress industry was materially injured by imports from Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Serbia, Thailand, Turkey, and Vietnam. When the CIT issued its merits opinion in December 2023, it included information that the Commission had treated as confidential because it came from questionnaire responses. The Commission immediately asked the court to retract the opinion and give parties the chance to identify what should be redacted, but the CIT denied the request.
The CIT concluded that the information either was available from public sources or was disclosed in a form that could not be associated with any particular company’s operations. The Commission appealed, arguing that the statutory scheme requires courts to preserve the confidential status the Commission assigns to information and that all questionnaire responses should automatically be treated as confidential.
The Federal Circuit never reached the merits of those arguments. Instead, the court found the appeal moot because the allegedly confidential information had been publicly available for over two years, making it impossible for any court to grant meaningful relief. The Commission tried to invoke the “capable of repetition yet evading review” exception to mootness, which applies when an action is too short in duration to be fully litigated and the same party is likely to face the same situation again.
The court rejected this argument because it had already addressed the very same confidentiality issues on the merits in the companion case decided the same day. Citing the Tenth Circuit’s reasoning in a similar situation, the Federal Circuit explained that issues cannot be said to “evade review” when they have already been reviewed and resolved in a related proceeding. The appeal was dismissed, with no costs awarded.