Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-caDC-09-05402/USCOURTS-caDC-09-05402-0/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
Ed Brayton
Appellant
Office of the United States Trade Representative
Appellee

Document Text:

United States Court of Appeals 

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT

Argued October 21, 2010 Decided April 19, 2011 

No. 09-5402 

ED BRAYTON, 

APPELLANT

v. 

OFFICE OF THE UNITED STATES TRADE REPRESENTATIVE, 

APPELLEE

Appeal from the United States District Court 

for the District of Columbia 

(No. 1:08-cv-00855) 

Adina H. Rosenbaum argued the cause for appellant. 

With her on the briefs was Scott L. Nelson. 

Alan Burch, Assistant U.S. Attorney, argued the cause for 

appellee. With him on the brief were Ronald C. Machen Jr., 

U.S. Attorney, and R. Craig Lawrence, Assistant U.S. 

Attorney. 

Before: GRIFFITH and KAVANAUGH, Circuit Judges, and 

EDWARDS, Senior Circuit Judge. 

Opinion for the Court filed by Circuit Judge GRIFFITH. 

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GRIFFITH, Circuit Judge: Ed Brayton filed suit under the 

Freedom of Information Act seeking disclosure of a classified 

international trade agreement. While the case was pending 

before the district court, the United States Trade 

Representative declassified and released the agreement to the 

public. The question before us is whether Brayton is entitled 

to recover attorney fees for his lawsuit. The district court 

determined he was not because the government was justified 

in withholding the document as a matter of law. We agree and 

affirm. 

I 

On December 17, 2007, during negotiations under the 

auspices of the World Trade Organization, the United States 

and the European Union signed a joint agreement outlining 

various trade concessions the U.S. would make to offset the 

costs imposed by its policy restricting access to Internet 

gambling. Two days later, Ed Brayton filed a FOIA request 

with the United States Trade Representative (USTR) seeking 

disclosure of the agreement. Although the Freedom of 

Information Act generally provides that government agencies 

“shall make available to the public” certain information upon 

request, 5 U.S.C. § 552(a), the Act expressly exempts the 

disclosure of information that is “properly classified,” 

id. § 552(b)(1). In January 2008, USTR denied Brayton’s 

request on the ground that the agreement he sought was 

classified pending completion of the ongoing trade 

negotiations. 

Two months later, the Freedom of Information Appeals 

Committee within USTR affirmed the agency’s decision to 

withhold the document. See Letter from Mark Linscott, Chair, 

Freedom of Info. Appeals Comm., to Ed Brayton (Mar. 25, 

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2008). The Committee determined that the document had 

been properly classified pursuant to Executive Order 12,958, 

60 Fed. Reg. 19,825 (Apr. 17, 1995), as amended by 

paragraph 1.4(b) of Executive Order 13,292, which provides 

that “foreign government information” may be treated as 

“classified national security information.” 68 Fed. Reg. 

15,315, 15,315, 15,317 (Mar. 25, 2003). Executive Order 

13,292 paragraph 6.1(r) defines “foreign government 

information” to include “information produced by the United 

States Government pursuant to or as a result of a joint 

arrangement with a foreign government or governments, or an 

international organization of governments, or any element 

thereof, requiring that the information, the arrangement, or 

both, are to be held in confidence.” Id. at 15,331.*

 The 

agreement Brayton sought was the product of negotiations 

conducted under WTO rules requiring agreements to be held 

in confidence until negotiations conclude. See General 

Council, Procedures for the Circulation and Derestriction of 

WTO Documents, WT/L/452 (May 16, 2002). 

In May 2008, Brayton filed a complaint in federal district 

court seeking an order disclosing the agreement on the ground 

that it was not properly classified. After he moved for 

summary judgment, USTR explained to the court that the case 

might soon become moot because: 

[A] representative of the European Community (“EC”) 

contacted USTR staff about the possibility of releasing 

the document publically in the future. Although USTR 

believes that a unilateral release would be inconsistent 

with WTO obligations, the agency is exploring the 

 

*

 Executive Order 12,958 and all amendments thereto have since 

been superseded by Executive Order 13,526, 75 Fed. Reg. 707 

(Dec. 29, 2009). 

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possibility of de-restricting the document with 

representatives of the EC. If, based on the mutual request 

of the EC and the United States, the WTO does derestrict the document, USTR will promptly de-classify it, 

make it publically available, and send a courtesy copy to 

Plaintiff. 

Def’s Consent Mot. to Enlarge Time to File Reply in Supp. 

Of Mot. for S.J. 2. 

After the parties filed cross motions for summary 

judgment but before the district court issued a decision, the 

Europeans agreed to release the trade agreement, which 

USTR declassified and sent to Brayton. Brayton then moved 

for attorney fees on the ground that he had “substantially 

prevailed,” 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(4)(E)(i), in his FOIA lawsuit. 

The district court denied Brayton’s motion, following the 

two-step analysis described in Weisberg v. U.S. Dep’t of 

Justice, 745 F.2d 1476 (D.C. Cir. 1984). First, in order to be 

“eligible” for fees, a plaintiff must have “substantially 

prevailed” on his FOIA claim. Id. at 1495. Second, the 

plaintiff must show that he is “entitled” to fees based on a 

combination of factors, including the reasonableness of the 

government’s initial refusal to disclose the requested 

information. Id. at 1498. Applying this framework, the court 

held that even if Brayton had substantially prevailed under his 

FOIA request and was thus “eligible” for fees, he was not 

“entitled” to them “because the defendant’s decision to 

withhold the Agreement was correct as a matter of law.” 

Brayton v. Office of U.S. Trade Representative, 657 F. Supp. 

2d 138, 145 (2009). 

On appeal, Brayton does not dispute the district court’s 

holding that USTR was correct as a matter of law to withhold 

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the agreement he requested, but he claims the court still 

should have considered awarding him fees because his claim 

for disclosure was “not insubstantial.” The statute provides 

that a complainant “may” recover attorney fees if his “claim is 

not insubstantial.” 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(4)(E). But the district 

court held that a plaintiff may not receive attorney fees if his 

claim is incorrect as a matter of law. Thus, according to 

Brayton, “[p]laintiffs will never receive fees if their claims are 

not insubstantial unless the defendants’ decision to withhold 

the documents also was incorrect on the merits.” Appellant’s 

Br. 13. Brayton argues that this result conflicts with the 

statutory text, which requires only that a plaintiff’s claim be 

“not insubstantial.” 

We have jurisdiction over this appeal under 28 U.S.C. 

§ 1291, and we review the district court’s refusal to award 

attorney fees for abuse of discretion. See Davy v. CIA, 550 

F.3d 1155, 1158 (D.C. Cir. 2008). A “district court abuses its 

discretion if it did not apply the correct legal standard . . . or if 

it misapprehended the underlying substantive law.” Kickapoo 

Tribe v. Babbit, 43 F.3d 1491, 1497 (D.C. Cir. 1995) (internal 

quotation marks omitted). We examine de novo whether the 

district court applied the correct legal standard. See FTC v. 

H.J. Heinz Co., 246 F.3d 708, 713 (D.C. Cir. 2001). 

II 

A 

The Freedom of Information Act provides that courts 

“may assess against the United States reasonable attorney fees 

and other litigation costs reasonably incurred in any 

case . . . in which the complainant has substantially 

prevailed.” 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(4)(E)(i). This language 

naturally divides the attorney-fee inquiry into two prongs, 

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which our case law has long described as fee “eligibility” and 

fee “entitlement.” Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Dep’t of 

Commerce, 470 F.3d 363, 368-69 (D.C. Cir. 2006). The 

eligibility prong asks whether a plaintiff has “substantially 

prevailed” and thus “may” receive fees. Id. at 368. If so, the 

court proceeds to the entitlement prong and considers a 

variety of factors to determine whether the plaintiff should

receive fees. Id. at 369. 

Over the last decade, the law of FOIA fee awards has 

been in considerable flux. Before 2001, the D.C. Circuit 

construed fee eligibility broadly under what was known as the 

“catalyst theory.” Under this doctrine, a plaintiff 

“substantially prevailed” not only when he obtained an 

official disclosure order from a court, but also when he 

substantially caused the government to release the requested 

documents before final judgment. See generally Summers v. 

Dep’t of Justice, 569 F.3d 500, 502 (D.C. Cir. 2009) 

(describing the operation of the old catalyst theory). 

If a plaintiff substantially prevailed and was thus 

“eligible” for fees, the court would then consider several 

factors to determine whether the plaintiff was “entitled” to 

fees, including whether the government’s initial decision to 

withhold the requested documents was reasonable. See Tax 

Analysts v. Dep’t of Justice, 965 F.2d 1092, 1093-94 

(D.C. Cir. 1992). If the government’s initial decision to 

withhold was clearly justified, that was the end of the 

analysis. As one case put it, “a party is not entitled to fees if 

the Government’s legal basis for withholding requested 

records is correct.” Chesapeake Bay Found. v. USDA, 11 F.3d 

211, 216 (D.C. Cir. 1993). 

In 2001, the Supreme Court held that plaintiffs generally 

would only be eligible for attorney fees if they were “awarded 

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some relief by [a] court.” Buckhannon Bd. & Care Home, Inc. 

v. W. Va. Dep’t of Health & Human Res., 532 U.S. 598, 603 

(2001). In 2002, we confirmed that Buckhannon applied to 

FOIA cases, holding that “in order for plaintiffs in FOIA 

actions to become eligible for an award of attorney’s fees, 

they must have ‘been awarded some relief by [a] court.’” Oil, 

Chem. & Atomic Workers Int’l Union, AFL-CIO v. Dep’t of 

Energy, 288 F.3d 452, 456-57 (D.C. Cir. 2002) (alteration in 

original) (quoting Buckhannon, 532 U.S. at 603). 

 The strict Buckhannon rule drew some criticism for 

allowing the government to stonewall valid FOIA claims but 

prevent an award of attorney fees by disclosing the documents 

at the last moment before judgment. An agency could simply 

refuse a FOIA request, wait for a lawsuit to be filed, drag its 

heels through the litigation process, and then release the 

requested documents at the last moment if the plaintiff 

appeared likely to win a judgment. Agencies could force 

FOIA plaintiffs to incur litigation costs while simultaneously 

ensuring that they could never obtain the merits judgment 

they needed to become eligible for attorney fees. To address 

this problem, Congress passed the OPEN Government Act of 

2007, Pub. L. No. 110-175, which abrogated the rule of 

Buckhannon in the FOIA context and revived the possibility 

of FOIA fee awards in the absence of a court decree. The Act 

redefined “substantially prevail[ing]” to include “obtain[ing] 

relief through . . . a voluntary or unilateral change in position 

by the agency, if the complainant’s claim is not insubstantial.” 

5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(4)(E)(ii). 

The purpose and effect of this law, which remains in 

effect today, was to change the “eligibility” prong back to its 

pre-Buckhannon form. The result is that plaintiffs can now 

qualify as “substantially prevail[ing],” and thus become 

eligible for attorney fees, without winning court-ordered relief 

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on the merits of their FOIA claims. See Davis v. U.S. Dep’t of 

Justice, 610 F.3d 750, 752 (D.C. Cir. 2010) (“Disapproving of 

the effect [Buckhannon and its progeny] had on the disclosure 

policies of administrative agencies, Congress enacted the 

OPEN Government Act of 2007 to establish that the catalyst 

theory applied in FOIA cases.”). Yet despite this shift in the 

standard for fee eligibility, the OPEN Government Act did not 

have any effect on the standard for fee entitlement, which has 

remained essentially unchanged since the days of the catalyst 

theory. For purposes of fee entitlement, the rule remains that 

if the government was “correct as a matter of law” to refuse a 

FOIA request, “that will be dispositive.” Davy, 550 F.3d at 

1162 (quoting Chesapeake Bay Found., 11 F.3d at 216). 

Plaintiffs who sue to force disclosure in such circumstances 

are not entitled to attorney fees. 

B 

Brayton’s argument relies chiefly on the statute’s 

provision that courts “may” award fees to plaintiffs whose 

FOIA claims are “not insubstantial.” He observes that the 

district court’s approach prevents plaintiffs with “not 

insubstantial” claims from receiving fees if the government 

was correct as a matter of law to withhold the requested 

documents. He argues that this effectively nullifies the 

statute’s lenient “not insubstantial” standard, replacing it with 

the stricter requirement that a plaintiff’s claim be correct on 

the merits to qualify for an award. 

The problem with Brayton’s argument is that the feeentitlement rule that the district court applied does leave room 

for fee awards in some cases where a plaintiff has a “not 

insubstantial” claim that falls short on the merits. Under the 

district court’s rule, fees are only barred where the 

government can demonstrate that its basis for nondisclosure 

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was “correct as a matter of law.” Davy, 550 F.3d at 1162. This 

requires the government to satisfy the summary judgment 

standard by showing that there are no genuine issues of 

material fact in dispute and that the government was justified 

as a matter of law in refusing the plaintiff’s FOIA request. If 

the government cannot carry this burden, a substantially 

prevailing FOIA plaintiff may receive fee awards as long as 

his claim was “not insubstantial.” 

FOIA provides only that attorney fees “may” be awarded 

to a substantially prevailing plaintiff. Rather than exercising 

its discretion in an ad hoc and potentially inconsistent fashion, 

the district court adhered to our circuit’s long-established rule 

of never granting a fee award to a plaintiff whose FOIA claim 

was incorrect as a matter of law. Of course, this rule means 

that a particular subset of substantially prevailing plaintiffs 

will never receive fees, but this is an inevitable consequence 

of following any rule at all. The rule in this case does not 

undermine the discretion granted by Congress but simply 

ensures that like cases will be treated alike—a necessary 

condition for “avoid[ing] an arbitrary discretion in the 

courts.” Missouri v. Jenkins, 515 U.S. 70, 129 (1995) 

(Thomas, J., concurring) (quoting THE FEDERALIST NO. 78, at 

529 (J. Cooke ed. 1961) (Alexander Hamilton)). 

Brayton urges that fee awards should not be foreclosed 

despite the fact that the government was correct as a matter of 

law to withhold the documents he requested. This 

interpretation would make the law of FOIA fee entitlement 

even more favorable to plaintiffs than it was before 

Buckhannon. Brayton claims that the legislative history of the 

OPEN Government Act bolsters his case, but if anything the 

history only suggests that Congress intended to reinstate the 

pre-Buckhannon rule for fee eligibility. See S. Rep. No. 110-

59, at 4 (2007) (“The bill clarifies that Buckhannon does not 

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apply to FOIA cases.”); id. at 6 (amendment to attorney’s fee 

provision is “the so-called Buckhannon fix”); id. (“This 

section clarifies that Buckhannon’s holding does not and 

should not apply to FOIA litigation.”); id. at 14 (Additional 

Views of Sen. Kyl) (“the bill legislatively overrules the U.S. 

Supreme Court’s decision in Buckhannon . . . as that decision 

applies to FOIA”); id. at 20 (Justice Department’s Views 

Letter) (“We understand this provision’s intent to be the 

overruling of the Supreme Court’s decision in Buckhannon

. . . and of a number of recent court of appeals decisions that 

have applied Buckhannon to reject the catalyst theory as a 

basis for FOIA attorneys’ fee awards.”); H.R. Rep. No. 110-

45, at 4 (2007) (bill “clarif[ies] that Buckhannon does not 

apply to FOIA cases”); id. at 6 (“This section makes clear that 

the Buckhannon decision does not apply to FOIA cases and 

ensures that requesters are eligible for attorney fees and other 

litigation costs if they obtain relief from the agency during the 

litigation.”); 153 CONG. REC. S10987 (daily ed. Aug. 3, 2007) 

(Sen. Leahy) (“The bill clarifies that Buckhannon does not 

apply to FOIA cases.”). 

Brayton points to a floor statement Senator Kyl made 

shortly before the passage of the Act, which he co-sponsored. 

The Senator stated that the Act would abrogate Buckhannon

in FOIA cases and allow courts to award attorney fees to a 

substantially prevailing plaintiff with a “not insubstantial” 

claim. He acknowledged that this “is a pretty low standard 

[that] would allow the requester to be deemed a prevailing 

party for fee-assessment purposes even if the government’s 

litigating position was entirely reasonable—or even if the 

government’s arguments were meritorious and the 

government would have won had the case been litigated to a 

judgment.” 153 CONG. REC. S10989 (daily ed. Aug. 3, 2007). 

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Even if the meaning of a law could depend on the 

unratified words of a single lawmaker, this statement would 

provide scant support for Brayton’s argument. Senator Kyl 

registered his understanding that the Act would allow some

plaintiffs with losing FOIA claims to receive attorney fees, 

not all such plaintiffs. As discussed above, the district court’s 

ruling is consistent with this outcome, inasmuch as it permits 

fee awards where the government, while ultimately correct, 

cannot show that its position is correct “as a matter of law” 

under the summary judgment standard. If a court finds that 

there were genuine issues of material fact in dispute before 

the case settled, the court may still award fees as long as the 

plaintiff has substantially prevailed on the basis of a claim 

that was “not insubstantial.” 

Although the vast majority of FOIA cases can be 

resolved on summary judgment, which means that in most 

cases finding the government’s position “correct as a matter 

of law” is the same as finding it “correct,” this is not always 

the case. In fact, there was a FOIA trial in our jurisdiction as 

recently as 2009. See In Def. of Animals v. U.S. Dep’t of 

Agric., 656 F. Supp. 2d 68 (D.D.C. 2009). That case involved 

a FOIA plaintiff seeking government records of an 

investigation into a research facility’s alleged violations of the 

Animal Welfare Act. The research facility intervened and 

opposed disclosure primarily under FOIA’s exemption for 

confidential commercial information. In explaining why the 

case could not be disposed of on summary judgment, the 

court stated the need for a trial to probe disputed factual 

questions involving “whether disclosure of the categories of 

information in the context of the documents sought by IDA 

would permit [the research facility’s] competitors to derive or 

reverse engineer [the research facility’s] proprietary 

information, thereby causing it substantial competitive harm.” 

In Def. of Animals v. U.S. Dep’t of Agric., 501 F. Supp. 2d 1, 

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6 (D.D.C. 2007). The opinion relied on two of our FOIA 

cases in which we held summary judgment would be 

inappropriate because genuine issues of material fact existed 

as to the applicability of a FOIA exemption. See Niagara 

Mohawk Power Corp. v. U.S. Dep’t of Energy, 169 F.3d 16 

(D.C. Cir. 1999); Wash. Post Co. v. U.S. Dep’t of Health and 

Human Servs., 865 F.2d 320 (D.C. Cir. 1989). Although such 

cases are rare, our doctrine must nonetheless take them into 

account. If the government settles a FOIA case that would 

have turned on disputed issues of material fact, the district 

court facing a request for attorney fees may not know whether 

the plaintiff’s claims were meritorious. It should not be 

obligated to hold a full trial to find out. 

Brayton argues that applying the summary judgment 

standard to evaluate the government’s nondisclosure decisions 

will open the floodgates by transforming every motion for 

attorney fees into a mini-trial on the merits of the underlying 

FOIA claim. But the fee-entitlement rule the district court 

applied in this case has been in place for quite some time, 

even before Buckhannon, and the federal judiciary has yet to 

be deluged. By relying on the summary judgment standard, 

the rule preserves the discretion of courts in fee 

determinations to avoid the swamp of merits adjudication 

whenever material facts are in dispute. 

It is undeniable that considering the merits of an agency’s 

nondisclosure decision will frequently complicate the 

adjudication of motions for attorney fees. But on the other 

side of the ledger is the concern that courts should not dole 

out fee awards to plaintiffs who bring FOIA lawsuits that 

cannot survive a motion for summary judgment. We resolved 

this tension long ago when we stated that “there can be no 

doubt that a party is not entitled to fees if the Government’s 

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legal basis for withholding requested records is correct.” 

Chesapeake Bay Found., 11 F.3d at 216. 

In closing, we note the irony that awarding fees to 

plaintiffs in Brayton’s situation might prod government 

agencies to be less rather than more transparent. In this case, 

USTR was under no obligation to declassify the document 

and release it to the public as quickly as it did. Instead, it 

could have delayed the process and withheld the documents 

much longer, and its decision still would have remained 

correct as a matter of law. Under the rule applied by the 

district court, agencies in USTR’s position can choose to 

relent for the sake of transparency and release requested 

documents without exposing themselves to monetary 

penalties: the fact that their initial nondisclosure decision 

rested on a solid legal basis creates a safe harbor against the 

assessment of attorney fees. Under Brayton’s approach, 

however, agencies with legal authority to withhold requested 

documents would have no such safe harbor. Thus they might 

hesitate to release the documents, since doing so would risk 

creating a “substantially prevail[ing]” plaintiff who might be 

entitled to fees. 

III 

For the foregoing reasons, the district court’s judgment is 

Affirmed.

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