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10  FOOD MARKETING INSTITUTE v. ARGUS LEADER MEDIA 

Opinion of the Court 

radically different constructions.  Ratzlaf v. United States, 
510 U. S. 135, 143 (1994). 

C 

That leaves Argus Leader to try to salvage the result, if 
not  the  reasoning,  of  National  Parks.  But  here  its 
arguments  prove  no  more  persuasive.    The  company
begins by rearranging the text of Exemption 4 to create a 
phrase  that  does  not  appear  in  the  statute:  “confidential 
commercial information.”  Then, it suggests this synthetic 
term mirrors a preexisting common law term of art.  And 
finally  it  asserts  that  the  common  law  term  covers  only
information whose release would lead to substantial com-
petitive  harm.    But  Argus  Leader  points  to  no  treatise  or 
case  decided  before  Exemption  4’s  adoption  that  assigned
any  such  meaning  to  the  terms  actually  before  us:  “com-
mercial  or  financial  information  [that  is]  privileged  or 
confidential.”  So  even  accepting  (without  granting)  that 
other  phrases  may  carry  the  specialized  common  law 
meaning  Argus  Leader  supposes,  the  parties  have  mus-
tered no evidence that the terms of Exemption 4 did at the 
time  of  their  adoption.  Nor  will  this  Court  ordinarily 
imbue  statutory  terms  with  a  specialized  common  law 
meaning when Congress hasn’t itself invoked the common
law  terms  of  art  associated  with  that  meaning.    See,  e.g., 
Bruesewitz v. Wyeth LLC, 562 U. S. 223, 233–235 (2011). 

Alternatively, the company suggests that, whatever the
merits  of  National  Parks  as  an  initial  matter,  Congress
effectively  ratified  its  understanding  of  the  term  “confi-
dential”  by  enacting  similar  phrases  in  other  statutes  in 
the  years  since  that  case  was  decided.    To  be  sure,  the 
ratification  canon  can  sometimes  prove  a  useful  interpre-
tive  tool.  But  it  derives  from  the  notion  that  Congress  is
aware  of  a  definitive  judicial  interpretation  of  a  statute
when  it  reenacts  the  same  statute  using  the  same  lan-
guage.  Helsinn Healthcare S. A. v. Teva Pharmaceuticals