Lyle Denniston comments on the Supreme Court justices’ reactions during oral argument on FCC v. ATT today:
With a clarity that approached the blatantly obvious, the notion that federal law gives corporations a right of “personal privacy” in their internal records steadily lost support as argument on the point unfolded Wednesday in the Supreme Court. By the time the hour was nearly over, what was left of the concept vanished in a wry and almost comic comment by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. Only a profound change of heart in final deliberations among the Justices, it appeared, could save the day for the privacy claims of AT&T Inc. and its business supporters.
Read more on SCOTUSblog. I hope he’s right in his assessment of how the case is going, although reading the whole recap, it’s not clear to me whether FCC attorney’s may have irritated Justice Scalia by not agreeing that the court should focus on a narrow interpretation of the statutory language of the exemption from FOIA requests.