Sharpe v. U.S. Fed. Highway Admin. (9th Cir.) (unpublished)— vacating the district court’s judgment, dismissing appeal as moot, and remanding the case because the agency produced over two thousand pages of documents during appeal after initially refusing to process the request for being too vague.
Wright v. Dep’t of Health & Human Servs. (D.D.C.) — granting the government’s motion for partial summary judgment in a case about records related to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System; concluding HHS and CDC conducted adequate searches because they were “conducted in good faith and target[ed] the record systems most likely to contain the requested information,” and even involved subject-matter “experts” to help “define search terms”; noting the agencies undertook supplemental search efforts, even though not required, thus demonstrating “responsiveness to [the requester’s] concerns”; accepting the government’s arguments that the requester had tried to expand his request by demanding “unrelated and unduly burdensome” additional searches for communications “with other government agencies and third parties”; reaffirming that “an agency satisfies its FOIA obligations when it provides requesters with information that is already publicly available, especially when the alternative would be to duplicate materials already accessible”; characterizing the requester’s arguments—including those related to searches of personal email accounts—as “mere speculation,” albeit “strongly worded”'; concluding further that the agencies properly withheld information under Exemptions 5 and 6 because the requester “has effectively waived any objection” and the agencies’ “justifications for withholding . . . are adequately supported.”
Summaries of all published opinions issued in 2025 are available here. Earlier opinions are available for 2024 and from 2015 to 2023.