Barrett composes majority opinion rejecting Sierra Club request

WASHINGTON — In her first opinion in an argued case, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who joined the U.S. Supreme Court in October, rejected a Freedom of Information Act request from an environmental group for documents about harm to endangered species.

Writing for the majority in the 7-2 decision, Barrett said the records were protected by an exemption to the act that shields documents that would disclose deliberations inside an agency before it makes a final decision. The exemption applied, she wrote, even to documents reflecting agencies’ last words on a given subject.

The dispute started in 2011, when the Environmental Protection Agency proposed a new regulation to govern cooling water intake structures, which can harm aquatic life. Under the Endangered Species Act, the agency was required to consult with two other units of the federal government — the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service — to gauge and address harm the regulation would do.

The services prepared draft documents saying that the proposed regulation would not do enough to protect endangered species and, apparently as a consequence, the EPA’s final regulation was more stringent than the one it had initially proposed.

The Sierra Club sued to obtain the documents under the Freedom of Information Act, and it won in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.