Heggestad v. United States Department of Justice

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• concluding that prosecution memoranda prepared by attorneys to assist their superiors in determining whether to authorize prosecution of the targets of a criminal investigation prior to the final decision to prosecute properly were withheld under Exemption 5
• concluding authorization of subordinate “to take certain actions does not deprive his superiors of their authority to make final decisions for the agency in certain cases”
• explaining that a “prosecution memoranda . . . created as an integral part of the [agency’s] investigation and its decision-making process with regard to whether or not to prosecute . . . is precisely the type of information universally held to be attorney work- product”
• “Documents covered by the deliberative process privilege are often also protected by the attorney work-product privilege”
• “Title VII’s emphasis on voluntary compliance would be compromised if federal courts were found to lack jurisdiction to enforce agreements of this sort”
• “The primary purpose of [the work-product privilege] is to protect against disclos[ing] the mental impressions, conclusions, opinions, or legal theories of an attorney or other representative of a party concerning litigation.”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).