Court opinions can be notoriously dry, filled with procedural wrangling and legalese. But now and again, judges reach for a literary flourish to make a point—or to capture the frustration, irony, or absurdity of a case. From Shakespeare to Orwell, fiction writers have helped courts frame the challenges of transparency, bureaucracy, and public records in vivid ways. The FOIA cases below show how a little literary insight can illuminate the law.
William Shakespeare: Much Ado About Public Records
Conservation Cong. v. U.S. Forest Serv., 235 F. Supp. 3d 1189, 1196 (E.D. Cal. 2017) (“‘And yesterday the bird of night did sit / Even at noon-day upon the marketplace / Hooting and shrieking.’ This litigation concerns the continuing viability of the revered Northern spotted owl . . . and whether it may soon portend its own demise at the hands of its protector, the federal government.” (quoting William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, act 1, sc. 2)).
James Madison Project v. Dep't of Justice, 302 F. Supp .3d 12, 24 (D. D.C. 2018) (“So, Defendants say, "a [tweet] by any other name would smell as sweet" as any other official statement, at least for purposes of the official acknowledgement doctrine.” (quoting William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, act 2, sc. 2)).
Leopold v. Cent. Intelligence Agency, 380 F. Supp. 3d 14 at n. 2 (D. D.C. 2019) (citing James Madison Proj., supra)
Lewis Carroll: The Logic of Wonderland
Essential Information, Inc. v. U.S. Information Agency, 134 F.3d 1165, 1169 n.1 (D.C. Cir. 1998) (Henderson J., concurring) (“If corrective action is needed, it is the Congress that must provide it. 'It is not for us to speculate, much less act, on whether Congress would have altered its stance had the specific events of this case been anticipated.'" (quotation omitted and citing Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, in The Annotated Alice 230-31 (Martin Gardner ed.1960) ("Contrariwise, ... if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't."))).
Wisconsin Project v. U.S. Dep’t of Commerce, 317 F.3d 275, 286 (D.C. Cir. 2003) (Randolph J, dissenting) (“In the end all the majority can come up with is some free-floating congressional intent about the meaning of a statute that no longer exists. Alice once encountered a comparable phenomenon: "`Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin,' thought Alice; `but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!'" (quoting Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland 69 (1946))).
George Orwell: The Enemy is Obfuscation
Truthout v. Dep't of Justice, 20 F. Supp. 3d 760, 768-769 (E.D. Cal. 2014) (While attempting to decipher its meaning, I recalled one of Orwell's observations when confronted with such writing: “As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse. George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” in A Collection of Essays 162, 165 (Anchor Books 1954). Which begs the question, why did the government resort to hackwork here? Orwell again: The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, [the writer] turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”).
Leopold v. Cent. Intelligence Agency, 177 F.Supp.3d 479, 488 (D.D.C 2016) (“Rather than penalize [agency declarant’s] concision, the Court would encourage more litigants to abide by Orwell's adage that “[i]f it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.” (quoting George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, in 4 The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell 139 (Sonia Orwell & Ian Angus eds., 1968))).
Mark Twain: The Wit of FOIA
Reliance Elec. Co. v. Consumer Product Safety Comm'n, 924 F.2d 274, 278 (D.C. Cir. 1991) (reverse FOIA action) (“To paraphrase Mark Twain, sometimes the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth”).
Alley v. U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, 590 F.3d 1195, 1197 & n.1 (11th Cir. 2009) (“Even if history does not repeat itself, events do sometimes rhyme. [FN1] This aphorism, or one like it, is often attributed to Mark Twain, although there is doubt about whether he is the author of it.” (citing Lawrence P. Wilkins, Foreword, Symposium: Then, Now and into the Future: A Century of Legal Conflict and Development, 28 Ind. L. Rev. 135, 137 & n.4 (1995))).
Charles Dickens: A Tale of Endless Procedures
Appleton v. FDA, 254 F. Supp. 2d 6 at n.7 (D.D.C. 2003) (“By ensuring that the request does not "become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means," the parties can avoid the ‘Jarndyce v. Jarndyce proceeding’ of which the plaintiff so colorfully warns.” (quoting Charles Dickens, Bleak House ch. 1 (Norman Page ed., Penguin Books 1971) (1853))).
Am. Immigration Council v. U.S. Dep't of Homeland Sec., 905 F. Supp. 2d 206, 220 (D. D.C. 2012) (“‘More guidance soon,’ however, does not undercut the finality of the guidance already given. Although Charles Dickens published David Copperfield in monthly serialization, each installment fixed the chapters it published.”).
Franz Kafka: Nightmares in Paperwork
Coldiron v. U.S. Dept. of Justice, 310 F. Supp. 2d 44, 54 (D.D.C. 2004) (“The words ‘Kafka-esque nightmare’ may well describe Coldiron's ongoing employment relationship with the INS. It is undisputed that the INS suspended her security clearance, demanded that she explain herself, and invoked (through the FBI) FOIA Exemption 1 to bar access to the very information upon which INS based its decision to suspend Coldiron. But because it appears that the FBI's invocation of Exemption 1 is proper, Coldiron may not access portions of the documents which would allow her to defend herself against the INS's claims.”).
Am. Ctr. for Law & Justice v. U.S. Dep't of State, 254 F. Supp. 3d 221, 223 (D.D.C. 2017) (“Not all authors are . . . Franz Kafka, completing his short story The Judgment in a single midnight session. For most, including Plaintiff American Center for Law and Justice, successful writing takes time and at least a redraft or two.”).
Gertrude Stein: The Elusive “There”
Alexander v. Federal Bureau of Investigation, 691 F. Supp. 2d 182, 197 (D.D.C. 2010) (Privacy Act case) (“After years of litigation, endless depositions, the fictionalized portrayal of this lawsuit and its litigants on television, and innumerable histrionics, this Court is left to conclude that with this lawsuit, to quote Gertrude Stein, ‘there's no there there.’”).
Lawless v. The Sec. & Exch. Comm'n, 5:21-cv-01637-JWH-SPx (C.D. Cal. Oct 11, 2023) (“While Lawless appears convinced that his correspondence with the SEC offers compelling circumstantial evidence to confirm his theory, an in camera review of the documents released thus far demonstrates that his suspicions are unfounded. Nothing in the released FOIA documents supports his version of events. As Gertrude Stein once remarked, there is no ‘there’ there.” (citing United States v. Menendez, 291 F. Supp. 3d 606, 633 (D.N.J. 2018) (citing Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (1937)))).
Sophocles: Ancient Voices on Modern Privacy
National Archives and Records Admin. v. Favish, 541 U.S. 157, 167-168 (2004) (“Burial rites or their counterparts have been respected in almost all civilizations from time immemorial. . .They are a sign of the respect a society shows for the deceased and for the surviving family members. The power of Sophocles' story in Antigone maintains its hold to this day because of the universal acceptance of the heroine's right to insist on respect for the body of her brother.” (citing Antigone of Sophocles, 8 Harvard Classics: Nine Greek Dramas 255 (C. Eliot ed. 1909))).
Lord Byron: Stranger Than Fiction
Dillard v. U.S. Dep't of Justice, No. 2:12-cv-3875 (N.D. Ala. 2013) (“Some improbable allegations might properly be disposed of on summary judgment, but to dismiss them as frivolous without any factual development is to disregard the age-old insight that many allegations might be ‘strange, but true; for truth is always strange, Stranger than fiction.’ (quoting Lord Byron, Don Juan, canto XIV, stanza 101 (T. Steffan, E. Steffan & W. Pratt eds. 1977))).
T.S. Eliot: From Quartets to Quagmires
Savage v. U.S. Dep't of Justice, Civil Action 22-2477 (D.D.C. 2024) (“In the last poem of his “Four Quartets,” T.S. Eliot wrote: We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time. Few litigants know this paradox of journeys as well as the parties here, who, on the heels of a prior dispute in the Second Circuit, return to the same starting point only to find the terrain much transformed.”).
Arthur Conan Doyle: The Case of the Hidden Evidence
Callimachi v. Fed. Bureau of Investigation, 583 F. Supp. 3d 70, 90 (D.D.C. 2022) (“A criminal can double his efforts to avoid detection once he knows the methods that law enforcement uses to catch wrongdoers. That is true even for historical methods. Not only do the law enforcement procedures of today build on what came before, but certain investigations might require a return to earlier investigative techniques. After all, Sherlock Holmes began using fingerprint evidence 130 years ago, and that technique remains critical to law enforcement today.” (citing Arthur Conan Doyle, Sign of Four 55 (Penguin Classics 2001) (1890))).
Voltaire: FOIA in the Real World
Bowers v. U.S. Dep’t of Justice, 690 F. Supp. 1483 (W.D.N.C. 1988) (“In the ‘best of all possible worlds’ dreamed of by Voltaire in Candide, the plaintiff would have his own counsel; and a trial judge in this court's position would, like the Justice Department, be represented by trained lawyers, so that when a proceeding is converted via mandamus into a proceeding that might well be captioned, "The Circuit Court versus the District Judge," the trial judge would not have to lay aside other duties and act as his own lawyer . . . However, I have to deal with the case in its present posture, realizing that this is not Voltaire's "best of all possible worlds" and that the constitutional integrity of the Judiciary, independent from the Executive Department, rather than Bruce Bowers' claim of right to get information from the government, has become the focus of the litigation.”).
Oscar Wilde: Every Record Reveals its Author
New York Times Co. v. National Aeronautics and Space Admin., 920 F.2d 1002, 1014-1015 nn. 4 & 6 (D.C. Cir. 1990) (dissenting opinion) (“To read Exemption 6, as the majority does, to protect ‘personal information’ about the author or maker of a file who is not also the subject ‘render[s] meaningless’ the ‘similar files threshold test, for every file created by a person yields some personal information about its author or maker. . . Linguists, literary theorists, philosophers, legal theorists, and other scholars have devoted substantial attention to the study of the kinds of information that writing or speaking reveals about an author apart from the explicit message in the writing or speech.” [FN6] As one might expect, this basic observation has not escaped the notice of artists. See, e.g., O. WILDE, The Picture of Dorian Gray, in THE COMPLETE WORKS OF OSCAR WILDE 379 (1963) (character in novel, a painter, asserting that ‘every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.’).”
Agatha Christie: The FOIA Whodunit
Terris v. Ctrs. for Medicare & Medicaid Serv., 794 F. Supp. 2d 29, 36-37 (D.D.C. 2011) (“To attribute such a nefarious scheme to Rice, a retired federal employee working on a contractual basis, sounds like the last scene in an Agatha Christie mystery, where Hercule Poirot assembles the suspects in the drawing room and exposes the true level of the perpetrator's deceit. While that is fun, attributing equal deception to a FOIA government contractor borders on the comical.”).
Joseph Heller: The Catch-22 of Disclosure
Am. Civil Liberties Union v. U.S. Dep't of Justice, 655 F.3d 1, 14 n.23 (D.C. Cir. 2011) (“Finally, the Justice Department contends that the incremental contribution of disclosure to the public interest is negligible ‘given the extensive public attention that this issue is already receiving’ . . . This is nothing more than a Catch–22 argument: if public attention were not already focused, the government would argue that shows there is no public interest in disclosure; because there is public attention, it argues that no more is needed.” (citing Joseph Heller, Catch–22, at 46 (paperback ed. 2004) (“There was only one catch and that was Catch–22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions.... Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch–22 and let out a respectful whistle. ‘That's some catch, that Catch–22,’ he observed.”))).
John Grisham: FOIA as Legal Thriller
Roth v. United States Dep't of Justice, 642 F.3d 1161, 1176 (D.C. Cir. 2011) (“In recent years, high-profile exonerations of death-row inmates have generated considerable public interest in the potential innocence of individuals sentenced to death.” (citing, inter alia, John Grisham, The Confession (2010))).
Jack Kerouac: On the Road to Delay
Am. Ctr. for Law & Justice v. U.S. Dep't of State, 254 F. Supp. 3d 221, 223 (D.D.C. 2017) (“Not all authors are Jack Kerouac, penning the bulk of his novel On the Road in (self-reportedly) three weeks. . . .” For most, including Plaintiff American Center for Law and Justice, successful writing takes time and at least a redraft or two.”).
Methodology
To find FOIA opinions citing fiction writers, a commercial legal database was initially searched using the names of 91 of the greatest literary fiction authors, as compiled by Scott Dodson & Ami Dodson in Literary Justice, 18 Green Bag 2d 429 (2015) (ranking the most literary justice of the Supreme Court and the authors most cited). The search was then expanded by consulting other lists of notable writers, including those of “popular” fiction. See, e.g., Ranker, The 500+ Best Writers of All Time, last updated Aug. 16, 2025.
