Posts tagged 'Supreme Court'
The Supreme Court giveth, the Justice Department taketh away
Posted: May 12, 2011 | Tags: Exemption 2, Exemption 3, Exemption 4, Exemption 6, Exemption 7, FOIA, Freedom of Information, Justice Department, Supreme Court
In March the Supreme Court rather bluntly told federal agencies and lower courts that they had been misinterpreting an exemption to the Freedom of Information Act for 30 years. Actually, the court could have said, in so many words, that folks should learn to read before they start saying what a law means.
The case involved a Washington man’s request for information about the blast radius of explosives stored on an island in Puget Sound. The Navy denied the request on grounds that the information could be withheld because of Exemption 2, which was designed, originally, to protect records ...
Supreme Court again rules in favor of openness
Posted: March 21, 2011 | Tags: Bloomberg News, Elena Kaga, Federal Reserve, FOIA, Freedom of Information, John Roberts, Supreme Court
For the third time in a month the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of letting the public have access to important government documents.
In the latest case Monday, the justices refused to hear a banking group’s appeal to keep secret the identities of banks that got trillions of dollars in loans from the Federal Reserve Bank during the financial crisis.
Bloomberg News and Fox News, in separate cases, had sued the Fed for details about the loans in 2008. A court ruled in 2009 that the documents should be released.
The Fed and the Clearing House Association appealed ...