Rause v. Deacon

How courts have described this case

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

• noting that an agency may provide as an explanation, for instance, “the futility of the term to narrow the field of documents or an office’s failure to use the term in question in its records or recordkeeping”
• “Narrowing a FOIA request to assist Plaintiffs in obtaining responsive records is part of an agency’s obligation to assist the requester.” (internal alterations omitted)
• accepting an agency justification that certain terms would be “overly broad when taken in context with [the agency’s] work”
• “OPA’s stated reason that it need not search for responsive documents underestimates the Office’s obligation under FOIA. An agency must construe FOIA requests liberally.” (internal quotation marks omitted)
• “Defendants’ use of varied search terms does not per se undermine the adequacy of the search, so long as Defendants offer an account of its search strategy in each location.”
• A search “need not be ‘perfect’ in Plaintiff[’s] estimation (or even the Court’s)[.]” (quoting Fox News Network, LLC v. U.S. Dep’t of Treasury, 739 F. Supp. 2d 515, 535 (S.D.N.Y. 2010))

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).