Malone v. USPTO (4th Cir.) -- affirming the district court's grant of summary judgment to the agency in a case where plaintiff sought records relating to a Patent Trial and Appeal Board proceeding, including draft opinions circulated to nonpanel judges, and ruling that: (1) disputed draft decisions and related emails were categorically predecisional and deliberative and thus properly withheld under Exemption 5; (2) PTAB's practice of circulating draft opinions to nonpanel judges did not constitute ex parte communications, as that term refers to communications between a party and a decisionmaker, not between two judges, and (3) no government misconduct exception exists under Exemption 5, but even if it did, plaintiff’s argument that PTAB’s circulation of draft opinions constitutes government misconduct was “utterly unsupported by law.”
Knight First Amendment Inst. at Columbia Univ. v. DHS (D.D.C.) -- granting in part and denying in part the agencies' motion for summary judgment in a case concerning border searches of electronic devices, and holding that: (1) DHS properly invoked Exemption 5's deliberative process privilege to withhold legal analyses in a “CRCL Impact Assessment,” rejecting the requester's argument that the privilege fails absent an identifiable final decision; (2) CBP failed to demonstrate that purely factual information in statistical spreadsheets could not be segregated and released; (3) CBP did not justify its use of Exemptions 6 and 7(C) to withhold travelers' country of birth, ethnicity, citizenship, and occupation, and ordering supplemental briefing; (4) ICE and CBP properly invoked Exemption 7(E) to withhold search reasons, notification data, aggregate demographic statistics, and internal analyses; and (5) DHS, CBP, and ICE satisfied FOIA's segregability requirement with the narrow exception of one DHS document citing Exemption 5.
Summaries of published opinions issued in 2026 are available here. Earlier opinions are available for 2025, 2024, and from 2015 to 2023.