The case involved plaintiff Adam Brook suing the Department of Health and Human Services and three employees under the Privacy Act and FOIA after submitting five requests to the Health Resources and Services Administration for records concerning the National Practitioner Data Bank, including personal documents, registration forms, voided adverse action reports, and emails from agency staff. The court granted the defendants' motion for summary judgment and denied the plaintiff's cross-motion, concluding that HHS had conducted adequate searches yielding over 3,000 pages of records and had properly withheld or redacted materials. The core reasoning was that the agency's declarations demonstrated searches reasonably calculated to locate responsive documents and that the withholdings were justified under FOIA Exemptions 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 to protect against unwarranted invasions of privacy or other statutory interests.
In this case, Sharon Lucas, as personal representative of her late husband Allan Earl Lucas’s estate, sued the District of Columbia alleging that the Metropolitan Police Department failed to treat his 1970s induction into the Marine Corps as a military furlough, reemploy him after discharge, and maintain proper employment records. The claims asserted violations of the Veteran’s Reemployment Rights Act, breach of contract, negligence, and entitlement to compensation under the Back Pay Act. The court granted the District’s motion for summary judgment on all counts and denied the plaintiff’s partial motion. It reasoned that the VRRA claim was barred by laches, the contract and negligence claims were barred by the statute of limitations, and the Back Pay Act claim could not succeed without a finding of an unwarranted personnel action.
Doraleh Container Terminal SA petitioned the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to confirm two 2019 LCIA arbitration awards against the Republic of Djibouti arising from a 2006 concession agreement to build and operate a container terminal; the awards found Djibouti breached the agreement's exclusivity and royalty provisions after it enacted legislation, issued decrees, and seized the terminal. Djibouti opposed confirmation, asserting lack of subject-matter jurisdiction and defenses under Articles V(1)(b) and V(2)(b) of the New York Convention. The court confirmed the awards, holding that it possessed jurisdiction under the Federal Arbitration Act, that Djibouti had received adequate notice and opportunity to be heard in the arbitration, and that enforcing a purely monetary award did not violate U.S. public policy.
Corporate Accountability Lab sued The Hershey Company and the Rainforest Alliance in D.C. Superior Court under the D.C. Consumer Protection Procedures Act, alleging that Hershey's marketing of certain products as 'sustainable' and 'responsible' was false and deceptive, and seeking only declaratory and injunctive relief. Hershey removed the case to federal district court on diversity jurisdiction grounds, asserting that the cost of the requested injunction would exceed $75,000. The court granted the plaintiff's motion to remand, holding that Hershey failed to meet its burden of establishing the amount in controversy because the non-aggregation principle requires dividing the cost of compliance pro rata among D.C. consumers, and Hershey made no attempt to show that this per-consumer amount exceeds $75,000. The court denied the request for fees and costs associated with removal, finding that Hershey's basis for removal was not objectively unreasonable given the lack of controlling precedent.
In Doe v. Rodgers, the plaintiff sought to keep his name pseudonymous in a prior court opinion, claiming that public linkage to a National Practitioner Data Bank report would destroy his prospects of employment as a cardiac surgeon in the U.S. The defendants asked the court to replace references to "Dr. Doe" with the plaintiff's real name. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted the defendants' request and ordered the opinion revised for public filing. Applying the standards from In re Sealed Case, the court found that the presumption of openness in judicial proceedings prevailed because the plaintiff's asserted harms were economic and already disclosed in other public lawsuits, did not involve sensitive personal matters, and were outweighed by the public interest in a suit challenging government conduct.
This case concerned Dr. Adam Brook and his LLC suing the Secretary of Health and Human Services and administrators of the National Practitioner Data Bank over the agency's maintenance and distribution of an Adverse Action Report filed by his former hospital. The report stemmed from Dr. Brook's 2009 resignation while the hospital investigated a surgical error during an emergency appendectomy on a minor patient, in which part of the patient's fallopian tube was removed. The court granted the defendants' motion to dismiss or for summary judgment and denied the plaintiffs' cross-motion for summary judgment. It applied rational basis review to the due process claims, upheld the report under the Health Care Quality Improvement Act as a voluntary resignation during an investigation, and rejected requests for recusal or further supplementation of the record.