The OLC's Opinions
Opinions published by the OLC, including those released in response to our FOIA lawsuit
This Reading Room is a comprehensive database of published opinions written by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). It contains the approximately 1,400 opinions published by the OLC in its online database and the opinions produced in Freedom of Information Act litigation brought by the Knight Institute, including opinions about the Pentagon Papers, the Civil Rights Era, and the War Powers Act. It also contains indexes of unclassified OLC opinions written between 1945 and February 15, 1994 (these indexes were created by the OLC and intended to be comprehensive). We have compiled those indexes into a single list here and in .csv format here. This Reading Room also contains an index of all classified OLC opinions issued between 1974 and 2021, except those classified or codeword-classified at a level higher than Top Secret (the OLC created this index, too, and intended it to be comprehensive).
Some opinion descriptions were drafted by the OLC, some were prepared by Knight First Amendment Institute staff, and some were generated using AI tools.
The Knight Institute will continue updating the reading room with new records. To get alerts when the OLC publishes a new opinion in its database, follow @OLCforthepeople on Twitter.
Showing 51–60 of 2214
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Annotated index of 1962 unclassified OLC legal opinions
The OLC disclosed a preliminary index of all unclassified OLC legal opinions issued in 1962 to the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. This version of the index (annotated by Institute staff) shows which opinions are already publicly available (blue).
7/23/2021
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Annotated index of 1963 unclassified OLC legal opinions
The OLC disclosed a preliminary index of all unclassified OLC legal opinions issued in 1963 to the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. This version of the index (annotated by Institute staff) shows which opinions are already publicly available (blue).
7/23/2021
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Annotated index of 1964 unclassified OLC legal opinions
The OLC disclosed a preliminary index of all unclassified OLC legal opinions issued in 1964 to the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. This version of the index (annotated by Institute staff) shows which opinions are already publicly available (blue).
7/23/2021
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Annotated index of 1966 unclassified OLC legal opinions
The OLC disclosed a preliminary index of all unclassified OLC legal opinions issued in 1966 to the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. This version of the index (annotated by Institute staff) shows which opinions are already publicly available (blue).
7/23/2021
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Annotated index of 1967 unclassified OLC legal opinions
The OLC disclosed a preliminary index of all unclassified OLC legal opinions issued in 1967 to the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. This version of the index (annotated by Institute staff) shows which opinions are already publicly available (blue).
7/23/2021
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Annotated index of 1968 unclassified OLC legal opinions
The OLC disclosed a preliminary index of all unclassified OLC legal opinions issued in 1968 to the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. This version of the index (annotated by Institute staff) shows which opinions are already publicly available (blue).
7/23/2021
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Annotated index of 1970 unclassified OLC legal opinions
The OLC disclosed a preliminary index of all unclassified OLC legal opinions issued in 1970 to the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. This version of the index (annotated by Institute staff) shows which opinions are already publicly available (blue).
7/23/2021
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Annotated index of 1971 unclassified OLC legal opinions
The OLC disclosed a preliminary index of all unclassified OLC legal opinions issued in 1971 to the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. This version of the index (annotated by Institute staff) shows which opinions are already publicly available (blue).
7/23/2021
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Annotated index of 1972 unclassified OLC legal opinions
The OLC disclosed a preliminary index of all unclassified OLC legal opinions issued in 1972 to the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. This version of the index (annotated by Institute staff) shows which opinions are already publicly available (blue).
7/23/2021
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Index of unclassified OLC legal opinions from 1959–64, 1966–68, and 1970–72
The OLC disclosed this index—of unclassifed OLC legal opinions from the years 1959–64, 1966–68, and 1970–72—to the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University during the litigation in Francis v. DOJ. Indexes of unclassified OLC legal opinions for the years 1965 and 1969 are also available in this reading room.
7/8/2021