Food Marketing Institute v. Argus Leader Media

Food Marketing Institute v. Argus Leader Media, 588 U.S. ___ (2019), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that, where commercial or financial information is both customarily and actually treated as private by its owner and provided to the government under an assurance of privacy, the information is "confidential" within the meaning of the Freedom of Information Act.

Background

Argus Leader (a newspaper) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Department of Agriculture (USDA) for detailed, store-specific data about transactions in the national food-stamp program (SNAP). The USDA refused to release the information, citing FOIA's Exemption 4, which protects "confidential" commercial or financial information obtained from a person or business.

Following existing precedent, the lower courts applied a "competitive harm" test, which required the information holder to show that disclosure would cause substantial competitive harm. The courts found this high standard was not met and ordered the data released.

On appeal, the Food Marketing Institute, representing grocery stores, argued that this judicially-created "substantial competitive harm" test was too strict and did not align with the ordinary meaning of the word "confidential" in the statute. Both the District Court and the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected this argument, upholding the disclosure order.

Supreme Court

Decision

First, the Supreme Court found that the Food Marketing Institute had standing to pursue an appeal. As a trade association of grocery stores whose members were the direct sources of the contested SNAP data, FMI established the three requirements for standing:

A concrete injury: the imminent disclosure of its members' commercial information

Traceability: the injury resulted from the lower court's order

Redressability: a Supreme Court reversal of the court below would prevent the disclosure

The Supreme Court, having established jurisdiction, turned to interpreting the term "confidential" in FOIA's Exemption 4, which protects from mandatory disclosure "commercial or financial information obtained from a person and privileged or confidential." Since FOIA does not define the term, the Court looked to its ordinary meaning at the time of the statute's enactment in 1966.