Opinion ID: 415475
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Description of the Documents

Text: 2 Maritime Administration officials, ruling on requests for loans or subsidies, the use of reserve funds maintained by shippers pursuant to the Marine Acts, and similar matters presented to the Agency by outsiders, may request legal advice from the Chief Counsel. 2 Advice is given in the form of legal memoranda from the Chief Counsel to the requesting official. A small fraction of these memoranda, considered important or significant, or addressing issues likely to recur, are designated CCOs by the Chief Counsel. Joint Appendix (J.A.) 26. Examples of CCOs, accepted by the Agency as typical of all CCOs, J.A. 29, are set out in the Joint Appendix at 5-13. 3 Each CCO is transmitted to the requesting official and circulated among the attorneys in the Office of the Chief Counsel, and a copy is bound into the current volume of CCOs maintained by that Office. The Office of the Chief Counsel staff also summarizes the facts and holding of the CCO on one or more index cards, and files these under appropriate headings. J.A. 26-28. Examples of the summary-index cards that Schlefer would have the Agency disclose appear in the Joint Appendix at 43-45. 3 There is no other distribution of CCOs or summary indexes within the Agency, but requesting officers are free to discuss their contents with other Agency officials. J.A. 59. 4 Though final Agency decisions and public statements are, of course, communicated to affected parties outside the Agency, CCOs themselves generally are not released to the public. 4 A published decision occasionally will refer to the CCO on which it relies, but the text of the CCO is disclosed only in the rare instance when it is explicitly incorporated in the published decision.