Cooper Cameron Corp. v. United States Department of Labor, Occupational Safety & Health Administration’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

5 federal appellate · 3 district · 1 state decisions

Most-quoted passages

The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 28 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “an agency’s duty to disclose records shall not apply to records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes, but only to the extent that the production of such law enforcement records or information ... (C) could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy. To determine whether this exemption applies, [the court] must first determine whether the records were compiled for law-enforcement purposes; if they were, then [the court] must weigh the public’s interest in disclosure against the individual’s right to privacy.”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Butler v. U.S. Dep't of Labor · Schiller v. Immigration & Naturalization Service

2. “The requester would thus face an evi-dentiary Catch-22 if the statute and the case law did not make allowances. The statute “expressly places the burden ‘on the agency to sustain its action’ and directs the district courts to ‘determine the matter de novo,” ’ giving no deference to the agency’s determinations. Courts generally will grant an agency’s motion for summary judgment only if the agency identifies the documents at issue and explains why they fall under exemptions. The agency often makes this explanation in an affidavit, but the affidavit “will not suffice if the agency’s claims are conclusory, merely reciting statutory standards, or if they are too vague or sweeping.” The D.C. Circuit, the federal appellate court with the most experience in this field, has held that because the burden to establish an exemption remains with the agency, the district court should not grant summary judgment based on a “conclusory and generalized” assertion, even if the FOIA requester has not controverted that assertion. We view this rule as an appropriate way of implementing the FOIA’s burden-of-proof allocation on summary judgment.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Schiller v. Immigration & Naturalization Service

3. “[a] corollary to this principle is that, because our focus must be upon whether disclosure serves the general public’s interest in governmental affairs, the specific motives of the party making the FOIA request are irrelevant. If the general public has a legitimate, albeit abstract, interest in the requested information such that disclosure is warranted, disclosure must be made despite the fact that the party actually requesting and receiving the information may use it for less-than-lofty purposes. Conversely, if disclosure of the requested information does not serve the purpose of informing the citizenry about the activities of their government, disclosure will not be warranted even though the public may nonetheless prefer, albeit for other reasons, that the information be released.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Schiller v. Immigration & Naturalization Service