Court Opinion

ID: 9429219
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:26:02.633445+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:17.950702
License: Public Domain

Justice Brennan,
with whom Justice Blackmun joins,
concurring in part and concurring in the judgment.
The Court rests its judgment on two alternative holdings: one a construction of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(b)(3), ante, at 26; the other a more limited holding under Exemption 5 of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 5 U. S. C. § 552(b)(5), ante, at 26. I find the latter holding unpersuasive and accordingly would rest exclusively on the former.
*29r-H
I agree wholeheartedly with the Court that Rule 26(b)(3) itself does not incorporate any requirement that there be actual or potential related litigation before the protection of the work-product doctrine applies. As the Court notes, “the literal language of the Rule protects materials prepared for any litigation or trial as long as they were prepared by or for a party to the subsequent litigation.” Ante, at 25. A contrary interpretation such as that adopted by the Court of Appeals would work substantial harm to the policies that the doctrine is designed to serve and protect. We described the reasons for protecting work product from discovery in Hickman v. Taylor, 329 U. S. 495 (1947):
“In performing his various duties, ... it is essential that a lawyer work with a certain degree of privacy, free from unnecessary intrusion by opposing parties and their counsel. Proper preparation of a client’s case demands that he assemble information, sift what he considers to be the relevant from the irrelevant facts, prepare his legal theories and plan his strategy without undue and needless interference .... This work is reflected, of course, in interviews, statements, memoranda, correspondence, briefs, mental impressions, personal beliefs, and countless other tangible and intangible ways— aptly though roughly termed . . . the ‘work product of the lawyer.’ Were such materials open to opposing counsel on mere demand, much of what is now put down in writing would remain unwritten. An attorney’s thoughts, heretofore inviolate, would not be his own. Inefficiency, unfairness and sharp practices would inevitably develop in the giving of legal advice and in the preparation of cases for trial. The effect on the legal profession would be demoralizing. And the interests of the clients and the cause of justice would be poorly served.” Id., at 510-511.
*30The Court of Appeals is doubtless correct in its view that the need to protect attorney work product is at its greatest when the litigation with regard to which the work product was prepared is still in progress; but it does not follow that the need for protection disappears once that litigation (and any “related” litigation) is over. The invasion of “[a]n attorney’s thoughts, heretofore inviolate,” and the resulting demoralizing effect on the profession, are as great when the invasion takes place later rather than sooner. More concretely, disclosure of work product connected to prior litigation can cause real harm to the interests of the attorney and his client even after the controversy in the prior litigation is resolved. Many Government agencies, for example, deal with hundreds or thousands of essentially similar cases in which they must decide whether and how to conduct enforcement litigation. Few of these cases will be “related” to each other in the sense of involving the same private parties or arising out of the same set of historical facts; yet large classes of them may present recurring, parallel factual settings and identical legal and policy considerations.1 It would be of substantial benefit to an opposing party (and of corresponding detriment to an agency) if the party could obtain work product generated by the agency in connection with earlier, similar litigation against other persons. He would get the benefit of the agency’s legal and factual research and reasoning, enabling him to litigate “on wits borrowed from the ad*31versary.” Id., at 516 (Jackson, J., concurring). Worse yet, he could gain insight into the agency’s general strategic and tactical approach to deciding when suits are brought, how they are conducted, and on what terms they may be settled. Nor is the problem limited to Government agencies. Any litigants who face litigation of a commonly recurring type— liability insurers, manufacturers of consumer products or machinery, large-scale employers, securities brokers, regulated industries, civil rights or civil liberties organizations, and so on — have an acute interest in keeping private the manner in which they conduct and settle their recurring legal disputes. Counsel for such a client would naturally feel some inhibition in creating and retaining written work product that could later be used by an “unrelated” opponent against him and his client. Counsel for less litigious clients as well might have cause for concern in particular cases; fear of even one future “unrelated” but similar suit might instill an undesirable caution, arid neither client nor counsel can always be entirely sure what might lie over the horizon. This is precisely' the danger of “[i]nefficiency, unfairness[,] . . . sharp practices” and demoralization that Hickman warned against.2
*32I do not understand the Court’s holding on this point to be limited to the FOIA context. The Court itself quite accurately characterizes its first holding as a “particular construction of Rule 26(b)(3).” Ante, at 26. Indeed, it could hardly do otherwise, since the plain meaning of Exemption 5 is that the scope of the Exemption is coextensive with the scope of the discovery privileges it incorporates. “Exemption 6 . . . exempt[s] those documents, and only those documents, normally privileged in the civil discovery context.” NLRB v. Sears, Roebuck & Co., 421 U. S. 132, 149 (1975) (footnote omitted). See also id., at 154-155; Federal Open Market Committee v. Merrill, 443 U. S. 340, 353 (1979); Renegotiation Board v. Grumman Aircraft Corp., 421 U. S. 168, 184 (1975); EPA v. Mink, 410 U. S. 73, 85-86, 91 (1973).3 Thus, nothing in either FOIA or our decisions construing it authorizes us to define the coverage of the work-product doctrine under Exemption 5 differently from the definition of its coverage that would obtain under Rule 26(b)(3) in an ordinary lawsuit. If a document is work product under the Rule, and if it is an “inter-agency or intra-agency memorandu[m] or lette[r]” under the Exemption, it is absolutely exempt.4
*33Since the Court rejects the “related litigation” test under Rule 26(b)(3), and since that holding necessarily governs the application of the work-product doctrine under Exemption 5, it need go no further. The Court proceeds, however, to put forward a second holding directly under FOIA. It reasons that work product generated in connection with a prior, unrelated litigation would not be “ ‘routinely’ available in subsequent litigation,” ante, at 27, because at the time of the Court of Appeals’ decision in this case a majority of federal courts that had decided the issue had rejected the “related litigation” test. Ante, at 26-27. This holding apparently would preclude disclosure under FOIA even in a district or circuit where the precedents under Rule 26(b)(3) do incorporate the “related litigation” test, since the “majority view” does not depend on the location of the library in which one reads the cases.5 I grant that uniformity of statutory interpretation is a good thing as a general matter, but I cannot see taking it this far.
I confess that the source from which the Court draws its reasoning is a mystery to me. I know of no other statutory context in which the test of discoverability (or anything else) is not what the correct view of the law is, but what the cur*34rent majority view is.6 Certainly the plain language of the statute is to the contrary; it directs a court to exempt material “which would not be available by law to a party ... in litigation with the agency.” 5 U. S. C. § 552(b)(5) (emphasis added). “By law” presumably means “by the law as correctly construed by the court deciding the case at hand,” not “by the law as construed (whether correctly or incorrectly) by a majority of other federal courts.” The Court draws the words “routinely” and “normally” from Sears, supra, at 149, and n. 16. But as a quick perusal of that case reveals, all we were saying there was that once a privilege is held to apply under Exemption 5, it applies absolutely, without regard to whether a party in ordinary discovery might be able to overcome the privilege by some showing of need (an understanding the Court itself embraces, ante, at 28). Alternatively, the Court cites our statement in Grumman Aircraft, supra, at 184, that “Exemption 5 incorporates the privileges which the Government enjoys under the relevant statutory and case law in the pretrial discovery context.” Ante, at 26-27 (emphasis by the Court). Again, however, the context of the quoted passage makes clear that it refers simply to the extent to which the correct state of the law with regard to a privilege may be embodied in cases interpreting a statute or erecting a nonstatutory privilege. The scope of the work-product doctrine on a particular disputed point, for example, may be. laid out in some binding precedent of the district court entertaining a given FOIA suit, of the court of appeals for that circuit, or of this Court. Absent a control*35ling precedent, of course, the district court would ordinarily look to the decisions of other courts to inform its own construction of Rule 26(b)(3). But nothing in Exemption 5, Sears, Grumman Aircraft, or anything else of which I am aware authorizes or directs that district court to do anything other than to determine what the legally correct interpretation of the doctrine is, and then to apply it — even if the interpretation it reaches is contrary to that of a majority of other courts. Under the Court’s reading of the word “routinely,” however, it appears that the district court would be obliged to adhere to the majority view even if there were unmistakable precedent in its circuit construing Rule 26(b)(3) to the contrary. I see no warrant for this astonishing principle. Hence, although I agree with the Court’s construction of Rule 26(b)(3), I join only its judgment.

 It is possible, I suppose, that such suits might be considered “related” in a very broad reading of the Court of Appeals’ “related litigation” test; the courts adopting the test have not had occasion to explore its outer boundaries. But this possibility merely reveals a dilemma: If the test is read so broadly as to classify similar but factually unrelated suits as “related,” it is virtually no limitation on the work-product doctrine at all, since almost any work-product document otherwise discoverable under Rule 26(b)(1) will have originated in “related” litigation. But to the extent that the “related” test is read any more narrowly than that, it threatens to cause the harm discussed in text. Hence, the test is either harmful or toothless.

 See generally, e. g., In re Murphy, 560 F. 2d 326, 333-335 (CA8 1977); United States v. Leggett & Platt, Inc., 542 F. 2d 655, 659-660 (CA6 1976); Duplan Corp. v. Moulinage et Retorderie de Chavanoz, 509 F. 2d 730 (CA4 1974); Duplan Corp. v. Moulinage et Retorderie de Chavanoz, 487 F. 2d 480 (CA4 1973).
The Court of Appeals reasoned that “[extending the work-product protection only to subsequent related eases best comports with the fact that the privilege is qualified, not absolute.” 217 U. S. App. D. C. 47, 50, 671 F. 2d 553, 556 (1982) (footnote omitted). In my view, this mistakes by 180 degrees the significance of the qualified nature of the privilege. As another Court of Appeals has explained:
“Were the work product doctrine an unpenetrable protection against discovery, we would be less willing to apply it to work produced in anticipation of other litigation. But the work product doctrine provides only a qualified protection against discovery....” Leggett & Platt, supra, at 660.
Indeed, to the extent that the need for protection of work product does decrease after the end of a suit, that fact might in some cases lower the *32threshold for overcoming the work-product barrier. A party seeking discovery of work product must show that “he is unable without undue hardship to obtain the substantial equivalent of the materials by other means,” Rule 26(b)(3). What hardship is “undue” depends on both the alternative means available and the need for continuing protection from discovery. See 8 C. Wright & A. Miller, Federal Practice and Procedure § 2024, p. 202 (1970).

 But see Federal Open Market Committee v. Merrill, 443 U. S., at 354: “[I]t is not clear that Exemption 5 was intended to incorporate every privilege known to civil discovery.” Of course, it is settled that the Exemption does incorporate the work-product doctrine. NLRB v. Sears, Roebuck & Co., 421 U. S., at 154-155.

 We held in Sears that Exemption 5 does not apply to “final opinions” explaining agency actions already taken or agency decisions already made. Id., at 150-154. The gist of our holding was that such documents are not within any privilege incorporated into Exemption 5 — specifically, that they *33are not covered by the Government’s executive privilege. Ibid. The same would be true of the work-product doctrine; it is difficult to imagine how a final decision could be “prepared in anticipation of litigation or for trial,” Rule 26(b)(3). It is also questionable whether such decisions would constitute “inter-agency or intra-agency memorandums or letters,” 5 U. S. C. § 552(b)(5).

 Presumably, this principle would work in reverse as well. That is, if the settled law of a particular district under Rule 26(b)(3) were that a particular type of document (some sort of investigative report, say) is within the work-product doctrine, but a majority of other courts disagreed, the district court entertaining a FOIA suit would be obliged to follow the majority view and grant disclosure, even though the same document would not be “routinely” disclosed in an ordinary lawsuit in that district.

 One might posit a different sort of incorporation of case law — one in which the relevant law was that in existence in 1966, when FOIA was enacted. The Court wisely declines to adopt this reading. There is nothing in FOIA that indicates that it intended to “freeze” the law that existed in 1966; the phrase “available by law” certainly seems to refer to the law at any given time. Indeed, this reading would preclude recognition of subsequent changes in statutory law, such as the adoption of Rule 26(b)(3) in 1970.