Animal Legal Def. Fund v. U.S. Dep't. of Agric. (N.D. Cal.) -- holding that: (1) the "reading room" provision of Section 552(a)(2)(D) does not require the agency to post records that have not yet been created, as the statute applies only to records that "have been released" under a prior request and not to "mere possibilities in the future, like the shadows swirling around Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come"; emphasizing that the court is “bound by the plain meaning of the statute” and that it is “quite mistaken to assume… that whatever might appear to further the statute’s primary objective must be the law”; finding further that the plaintiffs failed to identify existing records with enough specificity to compel posting; and (2) the agency improperly withheld borrower names and addresses under Exemptions 3 and 6, because such data fell under the "payment information" exception of 7 U.S.C. § 8791 and because the privacy interests of federal loan recipients were outweighed by public interest; in "open[ing] agency action to the light of public scrutiny"; holding further that the agency properly withheld the underlying substance of producer-provided information under Exemption 3, noting that the statutory protection for such data does not "vanish simply because USDA repeated the information in its own documents."
Summaries of published opinions issued in 2026 are available here. Earlier opinions are available for 2025, 2024, and from 2015 to 2023.