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2  FOOD MARKETING INSTITUTE v. ARGUS LEADER MEDIA 

Syllabus 

to the judgment ordering disclosure; and a favorable ruling from this
Court would redress the retailers’ injury by reversing that judgment. 
Pp. 4–5.

2. Where  commercial  or  financial  information  is  both  customarily
and actually treated as private by its owner and provided to the gov-
ernment under an assurance of privacy, the information is “confiden-
tial” within Exemption 4’s meaning.  Pp. 5–12. 

(a) At  the  time  of  FOIA’s  enactment,  the  term  “confidential” 
meant  “private”  or  “secret.”    Contemporary  dictionaries  suggest  two 
conditions  that  might  be  required  for  information  communicated  to 
another  to  be  considered  confidential:  when  the  information  is  cus-
tomarily kept private, or at least closely held, by the person impart-
ing  it;  and  when  the  party  receiving  the  information  provides  some
assurance that it will remain secret.  At least the first of these condi-
tions must be met; it is hard to see how information could be deemed 
confidential if its owner shares it freely.  But the Court need not re-
solve whether both conditions are necessary because both conditions 
are clearly met here.  Uncontested testimony established that the In-
stitute’s  retailers  customarily  do  not  disclose  store-level  SNAP  data
or  make  it  publicly  available.    And  to  induce  retailers  to  participate 
in  SNAP  and  provide  store-level  information,  the  government  has 
long  promised  retailers  that  it  will  keep  their  information  private. 
Early courts of appeals confronting Exemption 4 interpreted its terms 
in ways consistent with these understandings.  Pp. 5–7.

(b) Argus  Leader  pins  its  hopes  on  the  “substantial  competitive 
harm”  requirement  from  the  D. C.  Circuit’s  decision  in  National 
Parks  &  Conservation  Assn.  v.  Morton,  498  F. 2d  765.    There,  the 
court inappropriately resorted to legislative history before consulting 
the  statute’s  text  and  structure  and  relied  heavily  on  statements 
from witnesses in congressional hearings years earlier on a different 
bill that was never enacted into law.  Unsurprisingly, National Parks 
has  drawn  considerable  criticism  over  the  years,  and  even  the  D. C. 
Circuit has distanced itself from the decision.  Pp. 7–10.

(c) Argus  Leader’s  attempt  to  salvage  National  Parks  is  unper-
suasive.    First,  it  rearranges  the  text  of  Exemption  4  to  create  a 
phrase that does not appear in the statute: “confidential commercial 
information.”  It suggests that this synthetic term mirrors a preexist-
ing  common  law  term  of  art  that  covers  only  information  whose  re-
lease  would  lead  to  substantial  competitive  harm,  but  points  to  no 
treatise or case decided before Exemption 4’s adoption that assigned 
any  such  meaning  to  the  terms  actually  before  the  Court.    Nor  will 
this  Court  ordinarily  imbue  statutory  terms  with  a  specialized  com-
mon law meaning when Congress has not itself invoked the common 
law terms of art associated with that meaning.  See, e.g., Bruesewitz