Wash. Lawyers' Comm. for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs v. DOJ (D.C. Cir.) -- affirming summary judgment for the government, finding that: (1) Federal Bureau of Prisons did not have an unlawful policy of practice of delaying FOIA responses, crediting agency’s good-faith efforts to improve processing times and manage high request volumes; and (2) rejecting appellant’s argument that disciplinary and educational records should be released through an expedited process like medical records under the Privacy Act.
Bender v. DOT (S.D. Cal.) -- granting the government's motion for partial summary judgment because plaintiff failed to properly exhaust the administrative remedies for three of his FOIA claims; specifically, plaintiff did not submit a valid appeal for his 2019 request, offered no evidence that appealing part of a 2022 request would have been futile, and incorrectly argued that a third request was merely a clarification rather than a formal submission.
Am. Wild Horse Campaign v. Bureau of Land Mgmt. (D.D.C.) (Mag. J.) -- reporting and recommending that plaintiff was both eligible for and entitled to attorney’s fees, noting that the agency changed its position on whether plaintiff’s request was reasonably described and released additional documents only after litigation commenced and the court had denied agency’s motion to dismiss; further finding that plaintiff’s billing rates were reasonable, but that several categories of billed hours—particularly those spent on post-production settlement negotiations and "fees-on-fees" work—were excessive and should be reduced.
Haleem v. DOD (D.D.C.) -- granting government’s motion for reconsideration concerning 17 pages containing “inscrutable code,” because the government’s supplemental declarations established that the code “can be deciphered by foreign intelligence actors or cyber criminals and used to evade DOD investigations, thus qualifying the pages to be withheld under Exemption 7(E).”
Summaries of all published opinions issued in 2025 are available here. Earlier opinions are available for 2024 and from 2015 to 2023.