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).
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 1901–1910 of 2202
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Constitutional memorandum concerning pretrial detention
7/27/2020
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Congressional Legislation Directed Against Obstruction of Federally Supported Colleges
7/27/2020
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Potential Liability of the Federal Government for Failure to Protect Witnesses and Potential Witnesses
7/27/2020
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Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia
7/27/2020
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Foreign State Immunity Legislation
7/27/2020
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Whether the number of White House Staff members paid in excess of GS‐18 can be increased beyond the fourteen positions established by 3 U.S.C. 105
10/27/2020
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Request for Opinion [regarding section 406 of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act]
7/27/2020
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Right of Government employees to submit complaints to the General Accounting Office
7/27/2020
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Encroachment Problem in "No Appropriation" Provisions
10/27/2020
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Effect of Repeal of Emergency Detention Provisions of Internal Security Act of 1950 on Presidential Power to Detain
10/27/2020