Heritage Found. v. CIA (D.D.C.) — granting the CIA’s motion for judgment on the pleadings with respect to the plaintiff’s expedition request because that request lacked the required certification that the grounds for seeking expedition were “true and correct,” which thus rendered it deficient; rejecting the plaintiff’s arguments that its non-compliance should be excused because “this is not a case where . . . [it] ‘matters’” and it subsequently added the necessary “magic words” in a second request for expedition; noting that the ruling does not impact the requester’s remaining claims and does not foreclose a motion for leave to amend or supplement the Complaint.
S. Envtl. Law Ctr. v. Tenn. Valley Auth. (E.D. Tenn.) — denying the government’s partial motion to dismiss for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction, where the requester attempted to challenge the agency’s search adequacy after filing suit for lack of a timely response; holding that the FOIA’s right to judicial review does not distinguish between “an agency’s compliance with the timeframe clause . . . [and] the disclosure, reasonable search, and/or exemption subparagraph(s)”; noting that “Defendant’s labyrinthine conception of the FOIA seems contradictory to the very purposes for which Congress enacted” the law, and if “the Court [were] to take this argument to its logical conclusion, agencies could short-circuit judicial review through precisely the procedural dynamics of this case: force a requester to seek judicial review by failing to timely respond, disclose some requested material only after a suit is filed, and immediately move to dismiss any potential challenge to the adequacy of the disclosure, itself, on grounds of subject matter jurisdiction.”
Summaries of all published opinions issued in 2025 are available here. Earlier opinions are available for 2024 and from 2015 to 2023.