Case Citator › Crooker v. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms

Crooker v. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms

Is it still good law? What later courts have actually done to this case.

Overruled
Court
D.C. Circuit
Citation
670 F.2d 1051
Decided
Confirmed treatments
2
Flagged citations read
61 of 61
Citing cases (total)
61
Treatment dates
1983–2011
Overruled
A reviewed court has overruled this case. Crooker v. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms was overruled on its broad reading of FOIA Exemption 2. In Milner v. Department of the Navy, the Supreme Court rejected Crooker's rule allowing agencies to withhold predominantly internal records whose disclosure risks circumvention of the law.
More on how this was screened

All 61 flagged citations have been read. The 2 confirmed treatments are listed below; later opinions reporting Milner's ruling do not themselves overrule Crooker.

Every treatment on this page is written from the citing opinion itself, with a verbatim quote, never copied from a commercial citator. A citation flagged by our screen but not shown here was read and found not to weaken this case.

61 later cases cite Crooker v. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms; 61 of those citations sat close to treatment language and were flagged for reading, and all of them have been read. Citations that did not sit near treatment language were not flagged and were not read one by one, so a court that weakened this case without using any of that language would not appear here.

Relying on Crooker v. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms?

This page shows what later courts did to it. Ask about your specific facts and see whether it still carries your argument, with citations you can check.

Treatments

Overruled

  • The Supreme Court rejected Crooker's High 2 rule, holding that Exemption 2 does not cover records merely because disclosure could risk circumvention of the law.

    Milner v. Department of the Navy · Supreme Court of the United States · filed

    But the Crooker interpretation, as already suggested, suffers from a patent flaw: It is disconnected from Exemption 2’s text. The High 2 test (in addition to substituting the word “predominantly” for “solely,” see n. 1, supra) ignores the plain meaning of the adjective “personnel,” see supra, at 569-572 and this page, and adopts a circumvention requirement with no basis or referent in Exemption 2’s language.
    Read the full opinion on CourtListener →

Questioned

  • The D.C. Circuit questioned whether Crooker's circumvention requirement for administrative handling instructions was too broad, but did not decide the issue.

    Founding Church of Scientology of Washington, D.C., Inc. v. Smith · D.C. Circuit · filed

    The only remaining difficulty arises from the implication in Crooker that administrative handling instructions, although within the broader reading of exemption 2, must be shown to threaten circumvention of agency regulation upon disclosure before withholding can be approved under the exemption. ... It is conceivable that this implication may be overbroad in light of Supreme Court precedent and the legislative history. ... Nevertheless, we need not reach that issue because the record in the present case satisfies even the more rigorous standard applied in Crooker.
    Read the full opinion on CourtListener →

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