Public Records and Open Meetings Laws: How Government Transparency Actually Works

Summary. Every state and the federal government maintain laws requiring that records be disclosed and that meetings be held in public, and almost nobody uses them well. This article explains how these laws operate: what counts as a record, who must produce it, the exemptions that do most of the work and how narrowly courts construe them, the procedural requirements that determine whether a request succeeds, and the litigation that follows a denial. It covers FOIA and its nine exemptions, the state acts that are frequently broader, open meetings requirements, and the craft of writing a request that produces documents.

Here is a small experiment worth running.

Pick a decision your local government made recently that you did not understand — a contract award, a zoning approval, a police policy, a school district decision. Write a letter asking for the records behind it. Send it to the agency's records officer.

In most states, that agency now has a statutory obligation to respond within a defined number of days, to produce what is not exempt, to identify what it withholds and why, and to segregate and release the non-exempt portions of partially exempt records. If it refuses, you may appeal, and in most states you may sue — and if you win, you may recover your attorney's fees.

That machinery exists everywhere in the United States. It costs a stamp. And it is used overwhelmingly by journalists, commercial data brokers, and litigants — almost never by the people whose government it is.

This article is about how it works, why requests fail, and how to write one that does not.

Part I: The federal act

The Freedom of Information Act, 5 U.S.C. § 552, requires federal agencies to make records available on request unless one of nine exemptions applies.

What it covers. Records of executive branch agencies, including departments, independent regulatory agencies, and government corporations.

What it does not cover. Congress, the federal courts, the President's immediate personal staff and advisory units whose sole function is to advise and assist the President, and state and local government — which are governed by state law instead. Records of private entities are outside it entirely, though records a private entity submitted to an agency are agency records subject to the exemptions.

The procedural obligations:

Twenty business days to determine whether to comply, extendable in unusual circumstances.
Expedited processing where there is a compelling need — an imminent threat to life or safety, or an urgency to inform the public about actual or alleged federal government activity for a person primarily engaged in disseminating information.
Fee categories — commercial, educational or scientific, news media, and other — determine which of search, review, and duplication fees apply. Fee waivers are available where disclosure is in the public interest and not primarily in the requester's commercial interest.
Segregation. Any reasonably segregable non-exempt portion must be released, with the exempt material redacted.
Administrative appeal within the agency, which is a prerequisite to suit.
Judicial review in district court, de novo, with the burden on the agency to justify withholding.
Attorney's fees to a substantially prevailing complainant.

The 2016 amendments added the "foreseeable harm" standard: an agency may withhold under an exemption only if it reasonably foresees that disclosure would harm an interest the exemption protects, or disclosure is prohibited by law. That standard was meant to end the practice of withholding simply because an exemption technically applied, and it has real force in litigation.

Part II: The nine exemptions, and how courts read them

Exemption 1 — Classified national defense and foreign policy information, properly classified under an executive order. Courts give substantial deference, though in camera review is available.

Exemption 2 — Internal personnel rules and practices. This exemption was dramatically narrowed by Milner v. Department of the Navy, 562 U.S. 562 (2011), which rejected the long-used "High 2" doctrine that had shielded any internal material whose disclosure would risk circumvention of the law. The Court held that Exemption 2 covers only records concerning employee relations and human resources — a genuine and rare example of an exemption being cut back rather than expanded.

Exemption 3 — Information specifically exempted by another statute that either leaves no discretion or establishes particular criteria for withholding.

Exemption 4 — Trade secrets and commercial or financial information obtained from a person and privileged or confidential. Food Marketing Institute v. Argus Leader Media, 588 U.S. 427 (2019), replaced the decades-old "substantial competitive harm" test with a plain-meaning approach: information is "confidential" if it is customarily and actually treated as private by its owner and provided to the government under an assurance of privacy. That materially broadened the exemption, and it is now the most significant obstacle to obtaining information about government contractors and regulated businesses.

Exemption 5 — Inter-agency and intra-agency memoranda not available to a party in litigation with the agency. This incorporates the civil discovery privileges — attorney-client, work product, and, most importantly, the deliberative process privilege, which protects material that is both pre-decisional and deliberative.

Two decisions define its edges. Department of the Interior v. Klamath Water Users Protective Ass'n, 532 U.S. 1 (2001), held that communications from outside consultants with their own interests in the outcome are not "intra-agency" and are not covered. And United States Fish & Wildlife Service v. Sierra Club, Inc., 592 U.S. 261 (2021), held that draft biological opinions that were never adopted remained pre-decisional and deliberative, even though they reflected the views of the officials who drafted them — a decision that expanded the privilege's reach.

The practical rule for requesters: deliberative process does not protect facts severable from the deliberation, does not protect post-decisional explanations of a decision already made, and does not protect material that has been adopted as the agency's final position.

Exemption 6 — Personnel, medical, and similar files whose disclosure would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy. Courts balance the privacy interest against the public interest in knowing what the government is up to — a formulation from Department of Justice v. Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, 489 U.S. 749 (1989), which held that a compiled criminal "rap sheet" implicates a substantial privacy interest even though its component records are individually public, and that the relevant public interest is only the one FOIA serves: shedding light on agency performance.

Exemption 7 — Law enforcement records, to the extent disclosure would (A) interfere with enforcement proceedings; (B) deprive a person of a fair trial; (C) constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy; (D) disclose a confidential source; (E) disclose techniques and procedures whose disclosure could reasonably be expected to risk circumvention of the law; or (F) endanger life or physical safety.

Exemption 7(C) — privacy in law enforcement records — is broader than Exemption 6, requiring only that the invasion be "unwarranted" rather than "clearly unwarranted." National Archives & Records Administration v. Favish, 541 U.S. 157 (2004), held that surviving family members have a privacy interest in death-scene photographs of a relative, and that a requester asserting government impropriety as the public interest must produce evidence that would warrant a reasonable person's belief that the impropriety may have occurred.

Exemption 8 — Financial institution examination records.

Exemption 9 — Geological and geophysical information concerning wells.

And the Glomar response. An agency may sometimes refuse to confirm or deny the existence of records where the existence itself is exempt — named for a case involving a vessel used in a covert recovery operation. It arises in national security and law enforcement contexts and is challengeable by showing official acknowledgment of the program's existence.

Part III: The state acts, which are frequently better

Every state has a public records act, and for most people they matter far more than FOIA — because police departments, school districts, city councils, county commissions, licensing boards, and state agencies are all governed by state law.

Where state acts are typically stronger:

Shorter response deadlines — frequently three to ten business days, sometimes with a requirement of immediate access to readily available records.
Narrower exemptions, and several states have no deliberative process exemption at all.
A constitutional right of access in a number of states, including Florida, California, Montana, and others, which changes the interpretive default.
Mandatory fee shifting for a prevailing requester in many states, sometimes with penalties against the agency or the individual official for willful violations.
Express coverage of electronic records, metadata, databases, and — increasingly — text messages and messaging-application content on personal devices used for public business.

Where they are weaker:

Standing or purpose requirements in a few states, and residency requirements in a small number.
Broad law enforcement exemptions in some states, occasionally categorical.
Personnel record exemptions that in several states shield police disciplinary files entirely — the single most contested issue in state transparency law over the past decade, with several states having repealed or narrowed those protections.
Fee structures that permit charging for staff time, which can make a large request prohibitively expensive.

What is almost always available: contracts and procurement records; budgets and expenditures; salaries and payroll; meeting minutes and agendas; correspondence about public business; inspection reports; permits and applications; property records; and final policies.

What is usually contested: ongoing investigation files; personnel and disciplinary records; drafts and deliberative material; security procedures; attorney-client communications; and anything involving a third party's privacy or commercial information.

Part IV: Open meetings laws

Every state also requires that meetings of public bodies be open, and the structure is remarkably consistent.

What triggers the law. A meeting of a public body at which a quorum discusses or acts on public business. Each of those terms is defined, and each is litigated.

The requirements:

Advance public notice, with a specified period and method — posting, publication, and increasingly website posting.
An agenda identifying the matters to be considered, with limits on acting on items not noticed.
Open attendance, with a right to observe and frequently to record.
Minutes, and in many states a recording, made available to the public.
Votes taken in public, with roll call recorded.

Executive session — a closed portion — is permitted only for enumerated purposes, which typically include: pending or threatened litigation; consultation with counsel on legal matters; personnel matters concerning an individual employee, often with a right of that employee to demand an open session; real property acquisition; collective bargaining; security matters; and certain student and medical records. The requirements around it matter as much as the list: the body must announce the specific statutory purpose before closing, must limit the discussion to that purpose, and generally may not vote in closed session.

The serial meeting problem. A quorum need not gather in one room to violate the law. Successive telephone calls, an email chain, a group text, or a chain of one-on-one conversations that collectively involve a quorum and reach a consensus constitute a meeting in most states. Modern open meetings litigation is substantially about text messages and messaging applications.

Remedies: invalidation of action taken in violation; injunctive and declaratory relief; attorney's fees; and, in a number of states, civil penalties against individual members who knowingly participate in a violation. Several states impose criminal penalties for willful violations.

The federal analogue is the Government in the Sunshine Act, 5 U.S.C. § 552b, which applies to multi-member federal agencies headed by collegial bodies — the FTC, SEC, FCC, and similar — and not to single-headed departments.

Part V: Writing a request that works

Most denials are avoidable, and most avoidable denials come from the request itself.

Identify records, not questions. A public records act compels production of existing records; it does not compel an agency to answer questions, create documents, compile new data, or explain itself. "Why did the council approve this contract?" produces nothing. "All emails between [official] and [vendor] from January 1 to June 30" produces documents.

Be specific enough to be searchable, broad enough to capture what you need. Name the custodians, the date range, the subject matter, and the record types. An agency that cannot identify responsive records without an unreasonable search may deny for lack of reasonable description — and an agency that wants to deny will seize on vagueness.

Ask for the right things:

Email, including attachments, and specify that you want text messages and messaging-application content on personal devices used for public business, which most states now cover.
Calendars of the relevant officials.
Contracts, amendments, invoices, and payment records.
The record retention schedule for the categories you are requesting — useful for knowing what should exist.
Databases in native format with a field list, rather than a printed report.
Metadata, where it matters.

Request the fee waiver and expedited processing in the same letter, with the basis stated.

Ask for a rolling production, so that you receive records as they are gathered rather than waiting for the entire request.

Ask for an index of withheld records with the exemption claimed for each — a Vaughn index in federal practice, and its equivalent under most state acts.

Anticipate the fee. Ask for an estimate before processing if the cost may exceed a stated amount, and narrow rather than abandon if it comes back high. Narrowing by custodian and date range is usually more effective than narrowing by subject.

Keep the tone businesslike. Records officers are frequently the only person in the agency doing this job, and a request that is clear and reasonable moves faster than one that is hostile.

Part VI: When a request is denied

Read the denial precisely. Which exemption? Applied to which records? Was anything withheld in full versus in part? Was a search conducted, and how was it described?

The recurring defects worth challenging:

No segregation. The agency must release reasonably segregable non-exempt portions. A record withheld in full is frequently a record nobody redacted.
Categorical withholding by record type rather than record-by-record analysis.
An inadequate search. The agency must conduct a search reasonably calculated to uncover responsive records, and must describe it. "We found no records" without describing where it looked is challengeable.
The foreseeable harm standard, at the federal level: even where an exemption applies, the agency must reasonably foresee harm to the protected interest.
Deliberative process misapplied to facts, to post-decisional material, or to a position the agency adopted.
Exemption 4 asserted without a showing that the information was customarily and actually treated as private and submitted under an assurance of privacy, per Argus Leader.
Privacy balancing that ignores the public interest in what the government is doing.
Unreasonable fees, or a fee waiver denial that does not address the public interest showing.

Appeal administratively. At the federal level it is required before suit. At the state level it varies — some states have an ombudsman or an attorney general opinion process, some go straight to court, and some require an appeal to the agency head.

Then litigate. In federal court, review is de novo with the burden on the agency, and a substantially prevailing complainant may recover fees. State statutes commonly provide for expedited proceedings, in camera review, mandatory fee shifting, and sometimes penalties. The fee-shifting provision is what makes these cases possible, and it is why agencies frequently produce records after suit is filed and before a ruling.

Part VII: Who uses these laws, and for what

Journalists, most visibly, though newsroom capacity has contracted.

Litigants, constantly and effectively. In civil rights, employment, land use, environmental, and government contract cases, a records request obtains in six weeks what discovery would take a year and a motion to compel to produce — and it obtains it before suit is filed, which shapes whether and how to file. See Bringing and Defending a Section 1983 Claim.

Businesses, for competitive intelligence, procurement information, regulatory posture, and the records of competitors submitted to agencies — the reason Exemption 4 is litigated as hard as it is.

Advocacy organizations, building the factual record for policy campaigns and litigation.

Individuals, dealing with a specific problem: the inspection report on a property, the complaint history of a licensed professional, the basis for a permit denial, the policy that was applied to them.

And commercial requesters, in volume, which is why fee categories exist.

Part VIII: A worked example

The situation. A county awards a $14 million contract for a new emergency dispatch system to a vendor that was not the low bidder. The award is announced at a meeting where the item appeared on the agenda as "Consideration of Public Safety Technology Matters."

The records request. Directed to the county's records officer:

The request for proposals, all addenda, and all questions and answers issued to bidders.
All proposals submitted, including pricing.
All evaluation materials: scoring sheets, evaluator notes, committee minutes, and the evaluation criteria.
All correspondence, including email and attachments, between any county employee or elected official and any bidder or its representatives, from six months before the RFP through the award.
All text messages and messaging-application content concerning the procurement, including on personally owned devices used for county business.
Calendars of the county administrator and the public safety director for the period.
Any conflict-of-interest disclosures filed by evaluators.
The contract, all amendments, and all invoices and payments to date.
The county's record retention schedule for procurement records.

With: a fee waiver request stating the public interest; a request for rolling production; and a request for an index of any withheld record with the exemption claimed.

The response. Items 1, 2 (with pricing redacted), 8, and 9 produced. Items 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 denied — deliberative process for the evaluation materials, and "no responsive records" for the text messages.

The challenge. The appeal argues: (a) evaluation scores are factual and severable from any deliberation, and post-decisional in any event once the award was made; (b) the pricing redaction fails under Argus Leader because prices submitted in a public procurement are not customarily treated as private and were not submitted under an assurance of privacy; (c) the "no responsive records" answer for text messages does not describe any search of personal devices, which state law covers; and (d) no index of withheld records was provided.

The open meetings issue, in parallel. The agenda item — "Consideration of Public Safety Technology Matters" — likely fails the requirement that an agenda reasonably describe the matters to be considered. If the board also discussed the award in a closed session not properly noticed for an enumerated purpose, the action may be voidable.

The outcome. After the appeal, the county produces the scoring sheets, releases the pricing, and — after a targeted follow-up specifying named officials and a date range — produces 340 text messages, including an exchange scheduling a dinner between the public safety director and the winning vendor two weeks before proposals were due.

Total cost: postage, a $60 duplication fee, and about six hours.

Part IX: The categories of records worth knowing about

Certain record types come up constantly, and each has its own access rules and its own recurring fight.

Police records. The most contested category in state transparency law. Incident reports are generally public; investigative files in an open case are generally exempt; and disciplinary and personnel records vary enormously — some states shield them categorically, several have repealed those shields, and a few have always treated sustained findings as public. Body-worn camera footage now has its own statutes in most states, typically balancing access against privacy for victims, minors, and people recorded inside homes, with retention periods measured in months. The practical rule: request promptly, ask specifically for the retention schedule, and know that footage not flagged as evidentiary may be gone in thirty to ninety days.

School district records. Budgets, contracts, board minutes, policies, and administrator correspondence are public. Student records are not — the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act restricts disclosure of personally identifiable education records, and districts frequently over-apply it to withhold material that is not a student record at all. Requesting aggregate or de-identified data usually resolves the objection. See Education Law for Schools and EdTech.

Health department and licensing records. Inspection reports for restaurants, care facilities, and childcare are public and are among the most useful records an ordinary person can obtain. Professional licensing boards publish disciplinary history, and their complaint files are frequently obtainable after a case closes. See Defending a Professional License Before a State Board.

Property, land use, and building records. Deeds, assessments, permits, plans, inspection results, code enforcement, and variance applications — nearly all public, nearly all online, and consistently underused by people about to buy property or oppose a project. See Zoning, Land Use, and Entitlements and Buying a Home.

Procurement and contracting. Solicitations, proposals, evaluations, contracts, amendments, invoices, and payments. Bidders routinely mark entire proposals confidential; after Argus Leader the federal standard is more protective than it was, but a blanket confidentiality legend is not a showing, and pricing submitted in a public procurement is rarely customarily private. See Government Contracting Basics.

Environmental records. Permits, discharge monitoring reports, inspection and enforcement files, and contamination records — much of it available both through state acts and through federal environmental statutes' own disclosure provisions. See Environmental Permitting and Compliance and Environmental Liability for Businesses and Property Owners.

Payroll and pension data. Public employee salaries are public in nearly every state, and pension data usually is. Home addresses, personal contact information, and medical information generally are not.

Email and messaging. The central modern issue. Public business conducted on a personal account or device is a public record in most states, and the practical difficulty is that the agency does not hold it. Request it explicitly, ask what search of personal devices was conducted, and ask for the agency's policy on the use of personal accounts for public business.

Part X: Records retention — the question nobody asks

A records request only reaches records that still exist, which makes the retention schedule one of the most useful documents an agency holds and one almost nobody requests.

Every public agency operates under a records retention schedule, adopted under state law and generally public, specifying how long each category of record must be kept. Text messages may be thirty days. Routine email may be one to three years. Contracts may be seven years past expiration. Personnel files may be decades. Body camera footage may be ninety days unless flagged.

Three consequences follow.

First, request early. The difference between requesting in week two and week twelve is frequently the difference between receiving footage and being told it no longer exists.

Second, request the schedule itself. It tells you what should exist, which converts a "no responsive records" answer into a question about whether the record was destroyed on schedule or improperly.

Third, unlawful destruction has consequences. Destroying a record after a request has been received, or outside the retention schedule, violates records laws in most states and can support sanctions, and — where litigation is anticipated — a spoliation finding. See Litigation Holds, Spoliation, and Rule 37(e).

And for agencies: a documented, followed retention schedule is protection. The agency that can show a record was destroyed in the ordinary course under an adopted schedule is in a very different position than the one that cannot explain what happened.

Part XI: The agency's side

Most of what frustrates requesters is not obstruction. It is capacity, and understanding that produces better results than adversarial framing does.

The typical records officer is one person, frequently doing this alongside another job, with no authority over the custodians whose email must be searched, and with a queue. A request that is clear, scoped, and prioritized gets processed. One that demands "all documents relating to" a subject over ten years gets set aside and eventually denied for lack of reasonable description.

What agencies should do, and what good ones do:

Publish proactively. Budgets, contracts, meeting materials, inspection results, policies, and salary data posted online eliminate the majority of routine requests. Several federal and state provisions require proactive disclosure of frequently requested records.
Acknowledge promptly, even when the substantive response will take time, and give a realistic estimate.
Communicate about scope. A five-minute call narrowing a request from ten years to eighteen months and from all employees to four named custodians serves both sides better than a denial.
Produce on a rolling basis.
Segregate rather than withhold in full. A record withheld in its entirety is the single most common defect in a denial and the easiest to reverse.
Explain the withholding record by record, with the exemption identified. A conclusory denial invites an appeal that would not otherwise have been filed.
Train custodians on what constitutes a public record, including messages on personal devices, and adopt a policy addressing it.
Follow the retention schedule, and be able to show that you did.

And the discipline that prevents open meetings violations: notice with an agenda that reasonably describes each item; announcement of the specific statutory purpose before entering executive session; discussion limited to that purpose; no voting in closed session; minutes that record the announcement and the votes; and a clear policy prohibiting members from conducting a serial discussion by email or text that reaches a quorum. Most violations are inadvertent, and nearly all of them are preventable by a checklist.

Why agencies should care beyond compliance. Transparency litigation is expensive, fee-shifting runs one way in most states, and an adverse ruling generates the coverage the agency was trying to avoid. The cheapest posture is to produce what is producible, explain what is not, and do it on time.

Part XII: Frequently asked questions

"Do I have to say why I want the records?" Under FOIA and most state acts, no — purpose is generally irrelevant to the right of access. Purpose does matter for fee waivers and for expedited processing, and it can matter in the privacy balancing under Exemptions 6 and 7(C). A few states impose residency or purpose limitations; check yours.

"Can they charge me?" Usually yes — duplication, and sometimes search and staff time, depending on the statute and your fee category. Ask for a fee estimate before processing, request a waiver with a public-interest basis, and narrow by custodian and date range if the estimate is high.

"They said it would take six months." Ask what is driving the estimate, offer to narrow, request rolling production, and ask them to produce the readily available records now. If the delay is unreasonable under the statute, it is generally treated as a constructive denial, which opens the appeal or litigation route.

"They redacted everything." Challenge it. The obligation to release reasonably segregable non-exempt portions is the most frequently violated provision in these statutes, and a fully redacted page is usually a page nobody analyzed line by line.

"Can I get records about myself?" Yes, and there are frequently better routes: the federal Privacy Act, state analogues, HIPAA's right of access for medical records, personnel file access statutes for employees, and education records under FERPA. Those routes are usually faster and cheaper than a general records request.

"Can I record a public meeting?" In most states yes, subject to reasonable rules on placement and disruption. Check the state's open meetings act, which frequently addresses recording expressly.

"The board went into executive session and came back and voted. Is that allowed?" The vote must generally be taken in open session, which it was. What is reviewable is whether the closed session was properly noticed for an enumerated purpose, whether the discussion stayed within it, and whether the agenda reasonably described the item. Minutes and any recording of the announcement are the evidence.

"What if the agency just ignores me?" Silence past the statutory deadline is generally treated as a denial, which starts the appeal or litigation clock. Document the request, the delivery, and the absence of a response.

"Is it worth suing?" Where fee shifting is mandatory for a prevailing requester — as it is in many states and, on a substantially-prevailing standard, under FOIA — a meritorious case is economically viable. A meaningful share of these suits produce the records before any ruling, because the agency's cost of litigating exceeds the cost of production.

Part XIII: Where transparency law is moving

Four developments are reshaping this field, and a practitioner should track all of them.

Messaging on personal devices. The dominant issue. Officials conduct public business on personal phones through text and encrypted messaging applications, and agencies frequently do not possess, cannot search, and have no policy addressing those records. Courts have generally held that the content determines whether a record is public, not the device or account on which it sits — but enforcement is difficult, and the practical remedies are policy requirements, custodian certifications, and, in litigation, discovery. Requesters should ask explicitly and ask what search was conducted.

Automated systems and algorithmic decision-making. When a public agency uses software to score risk, allocate benefits, screen applications, or direct enforcement, the model, its inputs, its training data, and its validation records are the records that explain the decision — and vendors assert trade secret protection over all of it. After Argus Leader strengthened the federal confidential-information exemption, this has become one of the hardest access problems in the field. Several states have begun requiring disclosure of the use of automated systems in public decision-making as a distinct statutory obligation. See AI Governance and Compliance.

Privatized public functions. When a private company operates a jail, runs a school, manages a utility, or administers a benefits program, the records documenting that work may sit outside the reach of a public records act. States have addressed this unevenly: some extend coverage to contractors performing governmental functions, some require contract clauses making records producible, and some leave a genuine gap. The practical answer for requesters is to seek the records through the contracting agency, which usually holds reports and deliverables, and to check whether the contract itself requires the vendor to produce records on request — a clause worth insisting on when drafting public contracts.

Police records reform. Over the past several years a number of states have repealed or narrowed statutes shielding police disciplinary and personnel records, and many have enacted body-worn camera statutes specifying what is releasable and when. This is the most active area of state transparency legislation, and the law in a given state may have changed since the last time anyone checked.

And a countercurrent worth naming. Fee structures that permit charging for staff time, broad categorical exemptions added by amendment, and response deadlines extended by "unusual circumstances" provisions have made access harder in some jurisdictions even as it has expanded in others. The right of access is not self-executing; it depends on deadlines being enforced, fees being reasonable, and denials being appealed. Which is, in the end, the argument for using it.

Primary authority

5 U.S.C. § 552 — the Freedom of Information Act, including the nine exemptions, the foreseeable harm standard, fee categories and waivers, expedited processing, administrative appeal, de novo review, and fee shifting.
5 U.S.C. § 552b — the Government in the Sunshine Act.
Milner v. Department of the Navy, 562 U.S. 562 (2011) — narrowing Exemption 2.
Food Marketing Institute v. Argus Leader Media, 588 U.S. 427 (2019) — the "confidential" standard under Exemption 4.
Department of the Interior v. Klamath Water Users Protective Ass'n, 532 U.S. 1 (2001) — outside consultants and Exemption 5.
United States Fish & Wildlife Service v. Sierra Club, Inc., 592 U.S. 261 (2021) — drafts and the deliberative process privilege.
Department of Justice v. Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, 489 U.S. 749 (1989) — the FOIA public interest and compiled records.
National Archives & Records Administration v. Favish, 541 U.S. 157 (2004) — survivor privacy and the evidentiary showing for an impropriety-based public interest.
The Privacy Act, the Federal Advisory Committee Act, and the Federal Records Act, which operate alongside FOIA.
State public records acts, open meetings acts, and records retention schedules, which vary materially and which govern most requests.