SCOTUS rejects FOIA case involving Planned Parenthood manual; two justices dissent
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The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to consider whether an exception to the Freedom of Information Act shields from disclosure Planned Parenthood’s Manual of Medical Standards and Guidelines.
Justice Clarence Thomas dissented from the cert denial on Monday in an opinion (PDF) joined by Justice Antonin Scalia.
New Hampshire Right to Life sought the manual, which was provided to the government in a noncompetitive grant application by Planned Parenthood of Northern New England. Alliance Defending Freedom links to documents in the case, including the cert petition (PDF).
The Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled in February that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services was authorized to withhold the document under FOIA’s Exemption 4 for “trade secrets and commercial or financial information obtained from a person and privileged or confidential.”
The U.S. Supreme Court has never interpreted Exemption 4. “In the meantime,” Thomas wrote, “Courts of appeals have declined to interpret the word ‘confidential’ in Exemption 4 according to its ordinary meaning.”
The 1st Circuit based its decision “not on the ordinary meaning of the term ‘confidential,’ but on conjectures as to whether disclosure could harm Planned Parenthood’s competitive position,” Thomas said. “The court deemed the manual confidential because ‘[a] potential future competitor could take advantage of the institutional knowledge contained in the manual’ to compete with Planned Parenthood at some later date.”
Thomas said federal appeals courts have relied on “nebulous language” in an en banc opinion by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to interpret competitive harm, resulting in varying versions of the test.
The 1st Circuit opinion “perpetuates an unsupported interpretation of an important federal statute and further muddies an already amorphous test,” Thomas wrote.
