Petroleum Information Corporation v. United States Department of the Interior

How courts have described this case

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

• noting that even hard facts may be withheld pursuant to the deliberative process exemption if their disclosure would “expose the deliberative process within an agency”
• holding that “materials that do not embody agency judgments,” including 15 “materials relating to standard or routine computations or measurements over which the agency has no significant discretion,” are not entitled to protection under Exemption 5
• explaining that “concerns with public confusion . . . could [] be allayed by conspicuously warning FOIA requesters that the 17 [document] is as yet unofficial”
• explaining that an agency formulates or exercises “policy- oriented judgment” through its “policy-informed or -informing judgmental process” and its “mode of formulating or exercising policy-implicating judgment”
• noting that the D.C. Circuit “applies in FOIA cases the same standard of appellate review applicable generally to summary judgments” but that, in contrast, the Ninth Circuit applies “a clearly erroneous standard”
• explaining that a predecisional document is a record that is “‘prepared in order to assist an agency decisionmaker in arriving at his decision,’ rather than to support a decision already made” (citation omitted)

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).