Court Opinion

ID: 9842032
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-22 20:12:27.3793+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:09:13.550937
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Brennan,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
Today’s decision explores hitherto uncharted territory in a complicated statutory scheme. I cannot agree with what is to me the Court’s crabbed interpretation of “improper withholding” under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). At the same time, I am not without some uncertainty about the contours of the “improper withholding” standard. Accordingly, although the result reached by my Brother Stevens strikes me as the most workable for the present, I write separately to articulate some ideas on this difficult problem.
As an abstract matter, I concur in the Court’s view that FOIA’s reach should not be conditioned upon the legality of a documents transfer under the Federal Records and Records Disposal Acts. 44 U. S. C. § 2901 et seq.; 44 U. S. C. § 3301 et seq. (1976 ed. and Supp. II). These Acts establish a fairly comprehensive scheme for internal records management, one element of which is an administrative process for regulating and enforcing records disposal standards. Thus, the “legality” of a document transfer for purposes of the Records Acts is, in a practical sense, partly a matter of administrative discretion. Conceptually, it seems strange to import such a discretionary factor into the legal standards that govern *159private rights of action under FOIA. And it is not surprising that the Records Acts and FOIA fail to mesh: The former scheme is evidently directed toward fostering administrative interests, while the latter is definitely designed to serve the needs of the general public. Consequently, the Records Acts either may fail to promote the interests embodied in FOIA,. or may address concerns that are irrelevant to FOIA.1 .
Although I agree that the Records Acts cannot be neatly interpolated into FOIA, I part company with the Court when it concludes that FOIA does not reach records that have been removed from a federal agency’s custody. If FOIA is to .be more than a dead letter, it must necessarily incorporate some restraint upon the agency’s powers to move documents beyond the reach of the FOIA requester. Even the Court’s opinion implies — as I think it must — that an agency would be improperly withholding documents if it failed to take steps to recover papers removed from its custody deliberately to evade an FOIA request. Ante, at 155, n. 9. Beyond that minimal rule, I would think it also plainly unacceptable for an agency to devise a records routing system aimed at frustrating FOIA requests in general by moving documents outside agency custody with unseemly haste.
Indeed, I would go further. If the purpose of FOIA is to provide public access to the records incorporated into Government decisionmaking, see Forsham v. Harris, post, at 188 (Brennan, J., dissenting), then agencies may well have a concomitant responsibility to retain possession of, or control over, those records.2 But, as with so many questions that *160the Court must resolve, the difficulty is where to draw the line. We could hardly assume that Congress intended agencies to be prevented from surrendering all documents that might be of interest to requesters — so broad a rule would not only swamp the agencies with paper, but would also seem incompatible with the records management goals of the Records Acts. See S. Rep. No. 2140, 81st Cong., 2d Sess., 4 (1950). Perhaps the appropriate test would take into account the importance of specific records; it might also consider the length of time records would be held, and the historical frequency of requests for documents of a particular type. To suggest the elements of such a test, however, is to expose how ill-suited a court is to define them adequately. It is Congress which has the resources and responsibility to fashion a rule about document retention that comports with the objectives of FOIA.
Although one might hope that Congress will soon address this problem, we must decide the case currently before us. I have little difficulty concluding that records which should have been retained for FOIA purposes may be reached under FOIA even though they have already passed beyond the agency’s control.3 In the absence of an analytically satisfying standard for determining which records should be retained, however, it is necessary to resolve this case by looking to an approach that is currently practicable. My Brother Stevens’ *161position fairly fits this prescription. While turning an FOIA suit upon the Records Acts is, as I have recognized, conceptually problematic, the records statutes do formulate document retention criteria that are not unduly burdensome and that carry a congressional imprimatur.
Accordingly, I agree with Mr. Justice Stevens’ conclusion with respect to the “improper withholding” issue, and therefore dissent from Part II of the Court’s opinion.

 For example, a document transfer may comport with the formal requirements of the Records Acts, and yet be motivated by the desire to avoid a pending FOIA request.

 This notion is not incompatible with NLRB v. Sears, Roebuck & Co., 421 U. S. 132, 161-162 (1975), and Renegotiation Board v. Grumman Aircrajt Engineering Corp., 421 U. S. 168, 192 (1975), which held that FOIA does not compel agencies to write opinions where not otherwise required. FOIA neither compels the Government to conduct research *160on behalf of private citizens, nor duplicates administrative law requirements of adequate explanation for Government action, see id., at 191-192.
What the Act does mandate is exposure of the research and explanations which the Government has chosen to memorialize; an agency’s obligation to retain records, therefore, may be inferred from FOIA without contradicting the principle that agencies need not create records.

 This will not necessarily entail the agency’s litigating against the third party in possession of the documents, as the Court suggests. Rather, the third party might be joined in the FOIA suit. Cf. Renegotiation Board v. Bannercraft Clothing Co., 415 U. S. 1, 18-20 (1974).