Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-caDC-12-05032/USCOURTS-caDC-12-05032-0/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
Central Intelligence Agency
Appellee
Jefferson Morley
Appellant

Document Text:

United States Court of Appeals

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT

Argued February 25, 2013 Decided June 18, 2013

No. 12-5032

JEFFERSON MORLEY,

APPELLANT

v.

CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY,

APPELLEE

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the District of Columbia

(No. 1:03-cv-02545)

James H. Lesar argued the cause and filed the briefs for 

appellant. 

Benton Peterson, 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: KAVANAUGH, Circuit Judge, and EDWARDS and 

WILLIAMS, Senior Circuit Judges.

Opinion for the Court filed PER CURIAM.

Concurring opinion filed by Circuit Judge KAVANAUGH.

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PER CURIAM: Jefferson Morley submitted a Freedom 

of Information Act request to the CIA for records related to 

CIA officer George E. Joannides. Morley believed the 

records might shed light on the assassination of President 

John F. Kennedy because Joannides had served as the CIA

case officer “in charge of” a Cuban group whose officers had 

contact with Lee Harvey Oswald in the months before the 

assassination. After not obtaining documents from the CIA, 

Morley filed a FOIA suit and as a result subsequently 

received some documents from the CIA. Morley then sought 

attorney’s fees as a substantially prevailing party. See 5 

U.S.C. § 552(a)(4)(E)(i). The District Court applied the fourfactor standard that this Circuit has set forth for considering a 

substantially prevailing party’s entitlement to attorney’s fees

in FOIA cases. See Morley v. CIA, 828 F. Supp. 2d 257, 261

(D.D.C. 2011). Those four factors are: (1) the public benefit 

derived from the case, (2) the commercial benefit to the 

requester, (3) the nature of the requester’s interest in the 

information, and (4) the reasonableness of the agency’s 

conduct. Applying those four factors, the District Court 

determined that Morley should not receive attorney’s fees. Id. 

This Court recently elaborated on one of those four 

factors, the public-benefit factor, which looks to the public 

benefit derived from the plaintiff’s FOIA suit. See Davy v. 

CIA, 550 F.3d 1155 (D.C. Cir. 2008). Davy, like this case,

concerned a request for records related to President

Kennedy’s assassination. In Davy, this Court said that 

records “about individuals allegedly involved in President 

Kennedy’s assassination[] serve[] a public benefit.” Id. at 

1159. We also noted that the standard for entitlement to 

attorney’s fees does not “disqualify plaintiffs who obtain 

information that, while arguably not of immediate public 

interest, nevertheless enables further research ultimately of 

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great value and interest, such as here the public understanding 

of a Presidential assassination.” Id. at 1162 n.3. We 

concluded, moreover, that “a balancing of the factors can only 

support the conclusion that Davy is entitled to an award of 

attorney’s fees.” Id. at 1163. 

In this case, the District Court did not consider the Davy

Court’s analysis of the public-benefit factor. See Morley, 828

F. Supp. 2d at 262-64. We therefore vacate and remand for 

the District Court to apply the four-factor standard in a 

manner consistent with Davy. We take no position here on 

whether the District Court should award fees.

So ordered.

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KAVANAUGH, Circuit Judge, concurring: The Freedom 

of Information Act provides: “The court 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). In determining whether a substantially 

prevailing FOIA plaintiff is entitled to attorney’s fees, this 

Court has long applied a four-factor standard that looks to (1) 

the public benefit derived from the case, (2) the commercial 

benefit to the requester, (3) the nature of the requester’s 

interest in the information, and (4) the reasonableness of the 

agency’s conduct. See Cuneo v. Rumsfeld, 553 F.2d 1360, 

1365 (D.C. Cir. 1977); see also Nationwide Building 

Maintenance, Inc. v. Sampson, 559 F.2d 704, 714 (D.C. Cir. 

1977).

We should ditch the four-factor standard. As Judge 

Randolph has cogently explained, the four factors have no 

basis in the statutory text. See Davy v. CIA, 550 F.3d 1155, 

1166 (D.C. Cir. 2008) (Randolph, J., dissenting); Burka v. 

HHS, 142 F.3d 1286, 1293-94 (D.C. Cir. 1998) (Randolph, J., 

concurring). And Congress’s decision not to include the 

four factors in the statutory text appears to have been

deliberate: The four factors were in the original Senate bill

addressing FOIA attorney’s fees, but the final bill did not 

include them. To be sure, the factors were mentioned in a 

Senate committee report, but the Supreme Court recently 

reiterated – in an eight-Justice opinion by Justice Kagan in a

FOIA case – that we should heed the statutory text of FOIA, 

not committee reports. See Milner v. Department of the Navy, 

131 S. Ct. 1259, 1267 (2011). In short, the text of FOIA does 

not require this four-factor standard.

Rather than mandating a four-factor standard, FOIA

grants courts discretion to determine when attorney’s fees 

should be awarded. It is not inappropriate for courts to flesh 

out that discretion with specific rules or standards that are 

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rational and consistent with the structure and purposes of 

FOIA. But the four-factor standard adopted by this Court is 

arbitrary and inconsistent with the structure and purposes of 

FOIA. 

FOIA is an equal-opportunity disclosure statute. For 

disclosure purposes, FOIA treats all requests and requesters 

the same – no matter the identity of the requesters, the

specific benefit that might be derived from the documents, or

the requesters’ overt or subtle motives. See 5 U.S.C. 

§ 552(a)(3)(A) (“each agency . . . shall make the [requested] 

records promptly available to any person”) (emphasis added).

With that backdrop, three of the four factors in the four-factor 

standard for attorney’s fee awards make little sense in the 

FOIA context – namely, the three factors that require 

evaluation of the public benefit derived from the case, the 

commercial benefit to the requester, and the nature of the 

requester’s interest. Those three factors incentivize and 

reward only certain kinds of FOIA requests and requesters, 

notwithstanding that FOIA deliberately renders the nature of 

the request and the identity of the requester irrelevant to 

whether a request should be granted. Those three factors are

therefore in tension with the basic structure and purposes of 

FOIA. 

Apart from the three factors’ basic incompatibility with 

FOIA’s structure and purposes, the three factors in application 

generate additional problems. With respect to the first factor,

the public benefit from the case, how can courts know 

whether some disclosures of government documents benefit

the public more than others? How does a judge evaluate 

“public benefit” in a principled way? Doesn’t this factor 

inevitably devolve into what the judge subjectively thinks is 

important, rather than an objective determination? And what 

about cases where the degree of public benefit may become 

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apparent only years later, after the litigation has ended? After 

all, information sometimes becomes meaningful only when

later pieced together with other information. And more 

broadly, even if the information is of value only to a small 

group or segment of the public, why treat those citizens as 

second class in determining who gets attorney’s fees? Put 

simply, the public-benefit factor is riddled with arbitrariness

in addition to contravening the basic equality-of-requester 

principle embodied in FOIA. See Burka, 142 F.3d at 1293-94 

(Randolph, J., concurring).

The second and third factors – the commercial benefit to 

the requester and the nature of the requester’s interest – are 

similarly flawed. Courts have stated that the requester’s 

potential commercial benefit from the information counsels 

against a fee award. But no business is a bottomless well, and

that is especially true of small businesses and individual

proprietors. And if attorney’s fees are not available, some 

businesses presumably will not litigate some FOIA disputes 

that they might otherwise have litigated. Yet FOIA doesn’t 

prioritize certain kinds of requests or requesters over others. 

Moreover, the case law has drawn an odd distinction between

an ordinary business’s commercial interests (which count 

against an award of fees) and a news organization’s 

commercial interests (which do not count against an award of 

fees). But one of the broad purposes of FOIA was to enable 

all citizens to directly access government information without 

having to rely on filters. So why penalize non-media 

businesses that directly seek more information about how the 

government is carrying out its responsibilities? And to add a 

further complication, who qualifies and doesn’t qualify as a 

news organization today? In short, the second and third 

factors also rest on arbitrary and ill-considered distinctions. 

See Burka, 142 F.3d at 1293-94 (Randolph, J., concurring). 

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When taken together, these factors cause even more

problems for FOIA plaintiffs and for the courts. The factors 

are so vague and malleable that they provide very little 

guidance to district courts. That leads to unpredictable and 

inconsistent fees results from case to case and judge to judge. 

And that unpredictability undermines whatever incentive the 

four-factor standard is supposed to create in the first place for 

plaintiffs with meritorious FOIA claims. In light of the 

uncertainty, how can would-be FOIA plaintiffs count on fees 

even if they have a meritorious claim? 

To reiterate, if FOIA required courts to consider these 

four factors, we would have to make the best of it. But FOIA 

does not so require. The courts have adopted the factors on 

our own. In my view, we should stop relying on these

atextual factors and stop discriminating against FOIA 

requesters’ fee requests based on a necessarily ill-informed 

perception of public benefit and an arbitrary assessment of the 

nature of the requester’s interests. Cf. Sebelius v. Cloer, No. 

12-236, slip op. at 10 (U.S. 2013) (an interpretation of an 

attorney’s fees provision should not be “inconsistent with the 

goals of the fees provision”); Martin v. Franklin Capital 

Corp., 546 U.S. 132, 139-40 (2005) (“When applying feeshifting statutes, we have found limits in the large objectives 

of the relevant Act . . . .”) (internal quotation marks omitted). 

We can do better. In an appropriate case, I think the 

Court should jettison the four-factor standard and adopt the

rule from Newman, where the Supreme Court construed a 

similarly worded civil rights fees statute and held that 

prevailing plaintiffs should receive attorney’s fees – with only

a very narrow exception for “special circumstances” such as 

bad faith by a prevailing plaintiff. See Newman v. Piggie 

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Park Enterprises, Inc., 390 U.S. 400, 402 (1968).1 A 

Newman-style rule for FOIA fee awards would be clear and 

predictable, would treat FOIA requests and requesters 

equally, and would incentivize would-be FOIA plaintiffs with 

meritorious claims. As a narrower alternative, albeit one not 

as favorable to FOIA plaintiffs as the Newman rule, we could 

simply continue to use the one factor from the current fourfactor standard that makes some sense in the FOIA context:

the reasonableness of the agency’s conduct. That factor 

makes some sense because it discourages a federal agency

from using its superior administrative and litigation resources 

to unfairly wear down meritorious FOIA plaintiffs. Under 

that approach, if the district court were to find that the agency 

acted unreasonably in withholding documents or otherwise

acted unreasonably during the litigation, the district court 

would award attorney’s fees to a substantially prevailing 

plaintiff. Otherwise, the district court would not award fees.2 

Either of those two alternatives would be clear, simple,

predictable, efficient, and consistent with the overarching 

structure and purposes of the statute – characteristics that

courts should strive for when deciding cases and that are 

sorely lacking in the current four-factor standard.

 1 Notably, a Senate committee report cited the statute 

construed in Newman as the model for FOIA attorney’s fee awards. 

See S. REP. NO. 93-854, at 17-18 (1974). Of course, the same

Senate committee report elsewhere listed the four factors. Cf.

ANTONIN SCALIA, A MATTER OF INTERPRETATION: FEDERAL 

COURTS AND THE LAW 36 (1997) (using legislative history can be

like picking out your friends at a party).

2 That factor is substantially the same as the standard for 

attorney’s fees under the Equal Access to Justice Act. See 28 

U.S.C. § 2412(d)(1)(A); Burka, 142 F.3d at 1293-94 (Randolph, J., 

concurring).

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It’s tempting to think that we should leave well enough 

alone given that we have applied the four-factor standard

since our 1977 decision in Cuneo. Two points together 

convince me that inertia is not the right answer. First, Justice 

Kagan’s majority opinion for the Supreme Court in Milner

recently rejected a similarly atextual 30-year-old FOIA 

precedent from this Court. See 131 S. Ct. at 1267. The 

Supreme Court emphatically concluded that it did not matter 

that this Court had applied a contrary interpretation for three 

decades. Id. at 1268. The obvious lesson to be drawn from 

Milner is that we should not reflexively cling to FOIA 

decisions that were decided on the basis of legislative history 

during an era when statutory text was less central to statutory 

interpretation. Second, and just as important, the four-factor 

standard causes continuing real-world problems – among 

other things, drawing arbitrary and unfair distinctions among 

FOIA requesters and requests, and generating satellite 

litigation that is wasteful and unnecessary. This case, which 

is now going back for a second round in the District Court, is 

a good exhibit of wasteful and unnecessary satellite litigation. 

Under a Newman approach, Morley would already have his 

fees, and this litigation would have long since concluded.

As a three-judge panel, we of course have to adhere to

the four-factor standard set forth in our precedents. Applying 

that four-factor standard, I accept the Court’s decision today

to vacate and remand in light of our prior decision in Davy. 

But the en banc Court has the authority to correct mistaken or 

outdated precedents of three-judge panels. I hope that, at 

some point, the en banc Court will adopt a more coherent 

approach, whether it be the Newman rule or a rule focused on 

the reasonableness of the agency’s conduct. As stated above, 

I prefer the Newman rule, but either of those two alternatives

would be a significant improvement over the current fourfactor standard.

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