Even town fool has opinions on FOIA

For better or worse, my town fool's face today graced The FOIA Ombuds, the blog of the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS) at the National Archives. I'm grateful to Kimberlee N. Ried, OGIS Compliance Team Management and Program Analyst, for heroic efforts to make an old man look good.

Police reform shines light on disciplinary records

CC0 Pixabay via picryl

A favorable reform to follow the police protest movement of recent years, stemming in particular from the killing of George Floyd, has been transparency around police disciplinary dispositions.

There is room for disagreement over what police reform should look like. I'm of the opinion that it costs society more to have police managing economic and social problems, such as homelessness and mental health, than it would cost to tackle those problems directly with appropriately trained personnel. I wouldn't "defund" police per se, but I would allocate public resources in efficient proportion to the problems they're supposed to remedy. We might not need as much prison infrastructure if we spent smarter on education, job training, and recreation.

Regardless of where one comes down on such questions, there is no down-side to transparency around police discipline. Police unions have cried privacy, a legitimate interest, especially in the early stages of allegation and investigation. But when official disciplinary action results, privacy should yield to accountability. 

Freedom-of-information (FOI) law is well experienced at balancing personnel-record access with personal-privacy exemption. Multistate FOI norms establish the flexible principle that a public official's power and authority presses down on the access side. Because police have state power to deprive persons of liberty and even life, privacy must yield to access more readily than it might for other public employees.

In September 2023, Stateline, citing the National Conference on State Legislatures, reported that "[b]etween May 2020 and April 2023, lawmakers in nearly every state and [D.C.] introduced almost 500 bills addressing police investigations and discipline, including providing access to disciplinary records." Sixty-five enacted bills then included transparency measures in California, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New York.

The Massachusetts effort has come to fruition in online publication of a remarkable data set. Legislation in 2020 created the Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) Commission. On the POST Commission website, one can download a database of 4,570 law enforcement disciplinary dispositions going back 30 years. There is a form to request correction of errors. The database, at the time of this writing last updated December 22, 2023, can be downloaded in a table by officer last name or by law enforcement agency, or in a CSV file of raw data.

The data are compelling. There are plenty of minor matters that can be taken at face value. For example, one Springfield police officer was ordered to "Retraining" for "Improper firearm usage or storage." I don't see that as impugning the officer, rather as an appropriately modest corrective and a positive for Springfield police. Many dispositions similarly suggest a minor matter and proportional response, for example, "Written Warning or Letter of Counseling" for "conduct unbecoming"/"Neglect of Duty."

Then there are serious matters. The data indicate termination of a police officer after multiple incidents in 2021, including "DRINKING ON DUTY, PRESCRIPTION PILL ABUSE, AND MARIJUANA USE," as well as "POSING IN A HITLER SALUTE." Again, it's a credit to the police department involved that the officer is no longer employed there. Imagine if such disciplinary matters were secreted in the interest of personal privacy, and there were not a terminal disposition.

The future of the POST Commission is to be determined. It's being buffeted by forces in both directions. Apropos of my observation above, transparency is not a cure-all and does not remedy the problem of police being charged with responsibility for social issues beyond the purview of criminal justice.

Lisa Thurau of the Cambridge-based Strategies for Youth told GBH in May 2023 that clarity is still needed around the role and authority of police in interacting with students in schools. Correspondingly, she worried whether the POST Commission, whose membership includes a chaplain and a social worker, is adequately funded to fulfill its broad mandate, which includes police training on deescalation.

Pushing the other way, the POST Commission was sued in 2022, GBH reported, by police unions and associations that alleged, ironically, secret rule-making in violation of state open meetings law. Certainly I agree that the commission should model compliance in rule-making. But I suspect that the union strategy is simply obstruction: strain commission resources and impede accountability however possible. Curious that the political left supports both police unions and police protestors.

WNYC has online a superb 50-state survey of police-disciplinary-record access law, classifying the states as "confidential," "limited," or "public." Massachusetts is among 15 states in the "limited" category. My home state of Rhode Island and my bar jurisdictions of Maryland and D.C. are among the 24 jurisdictions in the "confidential" category.

"Sunshine State" Florida is among 12 states in the "public" category. In a lawsuit by the Tallahassee Police Benevolent Association, the Florida Supreme Court ruled unanimously in November 2023 that Marsy's Law, a privacy law enacted to protect crime victims, does not shield the identity of police officers in misconduct matters. (E.g., Tallahassee Democrat.)

Opioid settlement disbursements must be transparent, state high court rules in row over nonprofit foundation

The nonprofit foundation responsible for disbursing hundreds of millions of dollars of opioid settlement money in Ohio is subject to state freedom of information laws, the state supreme court ruled Thursday.

Big money is flowing out of opioid settlements, such as the $10 billion deal struck by pharmacies CVS and Walgreens. Ohio will see some $450 million of that money, Emily Field reported for Law360 (limited free access). At least half of it will be disbursed by a nonprofit organization that state and local governments created for the purpose, the OneOhio Recovery Foundation.

A representative of Harm Reduction Ohio (HRO), another nonprofit organization, concerned with preventing overdose deaths, was shown the door at a OneOhio meeting not open to the public. OneOhio subsequently refused to reply to record requests under the Ohio public records act (PRA).

That will change now, as the Ohio Supreme Court ruled unanimously that OneOhio is the functional equivalent of a public entity, the test for bringing quasi-private actors within the scope of the PRA. To determine functional equivalence, the court explained, a totality-of-the-circumstances, multi-factor test asks:

(1) whether the entity performs a governmental function,
(2) the level of government funding, 
(3) the extent of government involvement or regulation, and 
(4) whether the entity was created by the government or to avoid the requirements of the Public Records Act.

The burden of proof is "clear and convincing," which is no low hurdle. 

The factors are common in functional equivalence tests in state sunshine laws in the United States. The devil is in the application. Characteristically, HRO and OneOhio posited very different analyses.

Though the multi-factor test makes no one factor dispositive, funding often proves controlling in cases such as these, even to the point that some states employ a disjunctive formulation along the lines of "state funding or state power." Here, the parties looked at the problem from differing angles. HRO characterized the money under the control of OneOhio, an entity created by government, as public money. OneOhio rather looked to the source of the money, private corporations, and to the ultimate beneficiaries, private-person recipients of state aid.

HRO had it right, the court decided. The analysis was bolstered by the inescapable conclusion that OneOhio was created by state and local governments through a memorandum of understanding specifically about how they would handle the money. OneOhio tried to resist the fourth factor by articulating it as conjunctive, thus, requiring an intent to evade the PRA. But the court had none of it.

Another somewhat superfluous argument by OneOhio merits mention. The foundation argued that subjecting it to the PRA would makes its funds vulnerable to raiding for other purposes by the legislature. Neither here nor there, the court opined. I suggest moreover that OneOhio's PRA accessibility is the result not the cause of its public status.

What's interesting about the argument from a tort perspective, though, is that OneOhio pointed to the example of tobacco settlement money. The Ohio executive and legislature responded to the 2008 financial crisis by diverting $230m in proceeds from the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement with Big Tobacco to unrelated purposes, namely, balancing the budget and fostering job creation. The Ohio Supreme Court upheld the diversion against constitutional challenges in 2010.

The application in the states of functional equivalence and similar tests to extend sunshine laws to quasi-private actors is highly variable, as much a function of the eye, or prejudices, of the beholder, as of any mathematical formula. That makes it difficult to extrapolate from the Ohio case beyond Ohio.

Still, I find this case offering a compelling analysis to access the infamously secret records of university foundations in other states. Those records, too, often are secreted upon the rationale that the funds originate with private donors. Consistently with the instant case, but not representing a majority rule in the states, the Ohio Supreme Court sided with a newspaper in 1992 in granting PRA access to the donor rolls of the nonprofit University of Toledo Foundation.

The instant case is State ex rel. Harm Reduction Ohio v. OneOhio Recovery Foundation, No. 2023-Ohio-1547 (May 11, 2023).

FOI seminar shines light on transparency research

In fall 2022, students in my freedom-of-information (FOI) law seminar produced another range of compelling research papers in which they inquired into hot issues in the law of access to government.

It's been my privilege to teach a law school seminar in FOI since 2004. For other teachers who might like to include FOI in the higher ed curriculum, my 2012 casebook and companion teaching notes are now available in full on my SSRN page. Please contact me if my contemporary syllabus or other materials can be of help. I teach the law of access broadly, from state law to federal, and in all branches of government. Students moreover are encouraged to pursue research projects in any vein of transparency and accountability, including access to the private sector, which has been a focus in my research, too.

In fall 2022, my students had the fabulous opportunity to participate contemporaneously in the online National FOI Summit of the National Freedom of Information Coalition (NFOIC).  I'm grateful to NFOIC President David Cuillier and Summit Organizer Erika Benton for making our participation possible.

My fall class was joined by a number of guest speakers who vastly enhanced students' exposure to FOI law, research, and practice. I am especially grateful to Professor Alasdair Roberts, UMass Amherst, who joined us live to talk about all things FOI, from his classic book Blacked Out (Cambridge 2012) to the implications for transparency and accountability of the research in his latest book, Superstates (Wiley 2022).

I thank Professor Robert Steinbuch, Arkansas Little Rock, who joined us to discuss his tireless work as an advocate in the legislature for transparency. He now writes powerfully about transparency and accountability as a regular columnist for The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and he is author of the treatise, The Arkansas Freedom of Information Act (LexisNexis 8th ed. 2022). I thank Professor Margaret Kwoka, Ohio State, who took time away from her ongoing FOI research in Mexico to join us to talk about that work and her recent book, Saving the Freedom of Information Act (Cambridge 2021).

I also thank attorney Alyssa Petroff and current law student Megan Winkeler, who joined us via Zoom to talk about their FOI research.  An alumna of my FOI seminar (as well as Comparative Law) and now a judicial law clerk for the Maine Supreme Court, Petroff discussed her recent article in The Journal of Civic Information on access to information about private prisons in Arizona.  An alumna of my 1L Torts classes, Winkeler has four years' experience in negotiation and mediation training and currently is researching negotiated rule-making in administrative law.

Here are the students' ambitious projects.

Madison Boudreau, The Benefits and Drawbacks of Reform Targeting Police Misconduct. The movement to increase public access to police misconduct and disciplinary records has proven to be a beneficial and necessary step toward heightened transparency and accountability of police departments and officers. However, states that have taken strides to open up access to these records continue to grapple with the ongoing barriers to public access despite their efforts. States seeking to implement similar changes to their open records laws will benefit by remaining aware of potential drawbacks to access despite reform. In the absence of impactful reform that effectively mandates the disclosure of these records, police departments have shown to prefer to remain under a cover of darkness, their internal personnel procedures left unchecked. As a result, the cycle of police secrecy is bound to viciously repeat itself.

Aaron Druyvestein, The Rise of Vexatious Requester Laws: Useful Regulation or Evasive Government Practice? The concept of freedom of information allows anyone to request any agency record for any reason, a model that has been replicated around the world and celebrated as a necessity for promoting democracy. The underlying goals of FOI to promote accountability are contingent on the government providing a strong and efficient FOI system. However, with the dramatic increase in FOI requests in the country, brought about in large part by better utilization of technology in FOI processes, there has been an increase in the burden on administrative agencies as a result of excessive, repetitive, or vindictive FOIA requests. Since 2010, governments' responses to these burdensome requests have resulted in the creation of so-called vexatious requester laws, which are intended to mitigate the effect of these requests on agencies.

Critics of vexatious requester laws argue that the laws are nothing more than a feeble attempt by the government to undermine otherwise valid records requests under the guise of improving government efficiency and reducing requester harassment. Concerns have been expressed that the laws' reliance on ambiguous terminology such as "vexatiousness" will give agencies discretion to deny requests based on subjective and unverifiable agency determinations of the requester's intent or motives for requesting. This paper analyzes the rise and application of vexatious requester laws as seen in the three states—Illinois, Connecticut, and Kentucky—that have passed statutory provisions permitting administrative agencies to deny requests to vexatious requesters. In addition, this paper investigates the policy implications of such laws on the broader FOIA system.

Alise Greco, Read It Before You Eat It: An Explicatory Review of the 2016 Nutrition Facts Label and Balancing FDA Transparency with Consumer Comprehension and the Food Industry. As the nation recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is difficult to ignore how drastically the American lifestyle has changed, especially with regard to diet and exercise. The Nutrition Facts Label (NFL), largely meant to influence and assist consumer decision-making for food and beverages, was last updated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2016. This paper explains the 2016 NFL regulation in greater detail in light of a current need by many Americans to make informed, healthier choices based on science rather than social media or misleading, corporate-designed packaging. The FDA is put under the microscope and evaluated on its ability to balance the needs of consumers to be provided transparent, useful information and the demands from industry to make a profit.

Nicholas Hansen, Only Those Who Count The Vote Matter: A Comparative Examination of Arizona and Federal Transparency Regulations Pertaining to Election Data and Procedure and Their Impact on Citizen Confidence in Democracy. This analysis details the protections afforded under the state of Arizona’s election data exemptions under both the Arizona Open Meetings Act and the Arizona Open Records Act, and provides comparisons to the protections afforded under similar exemptions provided at the federal level. Characterizations of the election data and procedural protections for both levels of government are offered, and examinations of what information is permitted for provision under FOIA requests substantiate these characterizations. This analysis proceeds with an understanding that examinations must be confined to information that is both the subject of and relevant to either historical or ongoing FOIA requests, rather than the information made available to the public through the procedures associated with courtroom disclosures. 

This author posits that Arizona’s trend toward enforcing relative transparency when courts are compelled to examine the efficacy and validity of local election procedures might serve as a model for states whose courts are less inclined toward making such information available to the public at large. Recent lawsuits, including those associated with the largely settled controversies alleged pertaining to the 2020 Presidential election, and those suits pertaining to the use of Dominion Voting System’s voting machines substantiate this advocacy.

This analysis concludes with a determination as to whether or not Arizona’s FOIA exemptions as they pertain to election data and procedural information inspire greater public confidence than those utilized at the federal level. Also offered are policy recommendations as to how the Arizona judiciary might be able to better handle future election data and procedural controversies by utilizing the already extant tools within the FOIA rules, as well as policy recommendations for legislative reform in other states and the federal level, should local legislators and Congress see fit to implement a more transparent, more accessible system of legal procedures to deal with future election controversies.

Mitchell Johnson, Transparency and Tragedy: How the Texas Public Information Act is Being Weaponized After Uvalde, Yet Can Be Used for Good. This comment examines the Texas "law enforcement exception" under the Texas Public Information Act (PIA) regarding the mandamus lawsuit that several media outlets filed to obtain records from the Department of Public Safety (DPS) after the Robb Elementary shooting on May 24, 2022. The paper focused on the DPS, and not on another law enforcement agency at the scene of the shooting on May 24, because of the actions of Colonel Steven McCraw. Colonel McCraw, the highest ranking official in the DPS, has provided inconsistent accounts to the public of what occurred on May 24. This comment also examines the specific exceptions that the DPS claims. The DPS claims that the records that are sought for disclosure are either (1) records relating to an active investigation, or (2) records that relate to the purposes of law enforcement. The DPS’s current utilization of these exceptions is not grounded in law. No criminal investigation is taking place because the shooter is deceased. Furthermore, while Colonel McCraw has stated that his agency is reviewing his troopers’ and rangers’ actions to determine whether there should be a referral to prosecutors, criminal charges might be futile because of governmental immunity. Also, many of the records requested pertain to "basic information" of a crime that must be disclosed under the PIA. Last, the comment proposes that the PIA should be amended to incorporate case law and create a "criminality showing" if a law enforcement agency wishes to withhold documents under an active investigation exception.

Ashley Martinez-Sanchez, The New Jersey Open Public Records Act and the Public Interest in a Narrow Statutory Interpretation of the "Criminal Investigatory" Exemption. The New Jersey Open Public Records Act (OPRA) expresses a strong public policy in favor of open and transparent government. OPRA champions the idea of a citizen's right of access to government records to ensure an informed public. However, transparency is not absolute. The OPRA permits secrecy for ongoing law enforcement investigations.  Courts should narrowly read the "criminal investigatory" exemption. This paper analyzes the evolution of the exemption over the years. It further examines what the future looks like for it in the legislative and judicial context.  I reference New Jersey case law and recent events in the state to contextualize the importance of narrowly reading the exemption. Inversely, the paper suggests that a narrow interpretation of the exemption not only would impede transparency efforts, but would raise civil rights concerns, particularly for marginalized and vulnerable communities in New Jersey. 

Marikate Reese, Police Accountability: Does it Really Exist? This paper demonstrates the power of police unions, and their contracts, in limiting accountability, transparency, and access.  The contracts are the catalyst to shielding officers from disciplinary actions, limiting civilian oversight, and restricting access to misconduct records. While states, such as New York, have become more transparent with their records, the unions still dictate a large part of police procedure.  This procedure includes, but is not limited to, delay of officer interrogations, obstructing investigations of misconduct, and destroying disciplinary records.  The procedures are safeguards put in place by collective bargaining practices, law enforcement bills of rights, and civil labor law protections.  The overall purpose of these safeguards is to establish rights, protections, and provisions for law enforcement officers including the arbitration process, training standards, and process of investigation. This paper provides a brief coverage of the protections afforded by collective bargaining, police bills of rights, and civil labor laws that stand in the way of the public transparency barriers and racial injustice.  Furthermore, this paper addresses how these procedural protections limit accountability while taking a look at the existing laws among various states.  This paper suggests several ways states have made strides for accountability and what limitations might arise as a result.

James Stark, What's the Deal with Doxing? Doxing is an entropic issue plaguing today’s society. Defining what it means to be “doxed” has been a problem that’s compounded by the fact that not all forms of doxing are equal. Some play a useful role in public discourse, while other forms of doxing enable harassment of private citizens. The current anti-doxing laws can be summed up in three categories. First are the “incidentals,” which tend be older laws that just incidentally happen to address doxing in some way due to the language used. The second category is “Daniel’s Law,” which is a law that has picked up traction for trying to protect public officials from doxing and its harms. Lastly are the “general” statutes, which were crafted to specifically fight doxing in general and protect as many people as possible from doxing. In order to properly combat doxing, legislatures need to agree that doxing is the unwanted release of personal or identifying information about an individual as a form of punishment or revenge, and that it can affect anyone, in government or not. The legislatures must focus on creating “general” statutes, and tailor the laws to protect the individuals, while allowing discourse around public officials. A poorly written anti-doxing law will result in either censorship or inadequate protection of individual Americans.

Marco Verch Professional Photographer via Flickr CC BY 2.0

Chad Tworek, Public But Private Athletic Departments. This paper address the Florida state policy that allows public universities to designate their athletic departments as private, thus evading the records requests for which compliance is required for any other public agency. In Florida, there are athletic departments at public universities that are private. While they are not funded by the university, they still act as an agent of the university and are afforded the same protections as public universities. If anyone is to sue these departments and seek to claim damages, there is a statutory cap on damages, $200,000. The cap pertains because courts find them to be mere components of the public entities they serve. Yet protection from public records requests allows these departments to accumulate money in secret and to spend without accountability. Such organization of athletic departments is moreover occurring elsewhere in the United States. The impact is to keep the public in the dark about how these arms of government do business.

Follow the dollar, name politicians in train disaster

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) blocked rail safety measures.
Medill DC via Flickr CC BY 2.0

Government "tried" to regulate rail, but industry "resisted" and "won."

That's what I heard tonight in a news break on National Public Radio about the East Palestine, Ohio, derailment disaster.

As if public safety regulation were a football match. Government just couldn't stop that offensive drive late in the second half.

No.

Blame industry, sure.  There's plenty blame to go around. But profits ahead of people? You can't be surprised. That's American industry's MO. And, to be fair, as long as no one gets hurt, we applaud.

Rather, save a big helping of blame for government. The same government now in Ohio trumpeting how Norfolk Southern will be held accountable.

Buck passed.

Government wasn't defeated in some contest with industry on the gridiron. Government failed. The people who are the government lacked the will to do the right thing, or worse, chose to do wrong.

Lee Fang for The Intercept dug into how the U.S. Senate, namely Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), blocked industry safety regulations eight years ago.

Follow the dollar.  Thune turns up, too, as a top-five recipient of rail lobbying dollars in 2021-22. Here's that list from Open Secrets:

• Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.), $107,343
• Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), $85,548
• Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.), $72,900
• Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), $69,550
• Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), $61,015

I think I know where we should send the contaminated soil from Ohio.

Nonprofit, nonpartisan Open Secrets has plenty of data. Check it out. If your congresspersons are on Big Rail's donee roster, don't send them back to Washington to try again.

Grand juror in Ga. Trump probe says little

Pres. Trump leaves Marietta, Georgia, in January 2021.

Trump White House Archives via Flickr (public domain)

The news is ablaze with the "odd 15-minute PR tour" of the grand jury foreperson in the Georgia Trump investigation, as former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman characterized her appearances to CNN.

Grand juries in the American justice system are secret for reasons that even access-advocate journalists and scholars such as myself tend grudgingly to respect. So I was shocked to see this 30-year-old grand juror, "who has described herself as between customer service jobs" (CNN), appearing above a "foreperson" banner, on my TV this morning.

I'm not naming her here, because I think she has had her 15 minutes. Literally. And she ought not be lauded for her TV blitz, which says more about the desperate breathlessness of the 24/7 news cycle than it does about a millennial's cravings for Likes or secrecy in the criminal justice system.

The legal reality of the foreperson's bean-spilling is not really as dramatic as splashing headlines suggest. In common law and in many states also by statute, grand jurors are bound to secrecy. Georgia grand jurors take an oath to that effect. But experts have pointed out that the grand jury investigating Trump's efforts to "find" votes in Georgia is a special, ad hoc, grand jury, so not necessarily operating under the usual statutes, and that Georgia law authorizes grand juries, though not individuals, to recommend publication of their findings.

More importantly, the judge in the instant matter apparently told grand jurors that they could speak publicly, subject to certain limits. The foreperson here said that she's steering within those limits, which appear to disallow disclosure of information about specific charge recommendations and the deliberations among jurors.

For all the media hoopla, the foreperson actually said very little, only that multiple indictments were recommended and that Trump and associates are targets of the investigation. That much already was publicly known. She refused to say whether the jury recommended charges against the former President himself, only teasing, "You’re not going to be shocked. It’s not rocket science" (CNBC), and there's "not going to be some giant plot twist" (N.Y. Times).

The common law presumption of grand jury secrecy means to protect the identity and reputation of unindicted persons and the integrity of ongoing investigations. Both of those aims further public policy, especially in the age of the internet that never forgets. There is some argument at the margins about when grand jury secrecy should yield to legitimate public interest. Accordingly, grand jury secrecy at common law is not an absolute, but a presumption, subject to rebuttal.

The case for rebuttal is strong when a President of the United States is the target of investigation. If grand jury secrecy is not undone in the moment, it's sure to be leveraged loose in the interest of history. Secrecy in the grand jury probe of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair in 1998 was unsettled by Clinton's own public pronouncements about his testimony. The "Starr Report" ultimately left little to speculation.

In cases of lesser magnitude, journalists and judges, naturally, do not always agree on the secrecy-public interest balance, and modern history is littered with contempt cases that have tested First Amendment bounds.

In a textbook case that arose in my home state of Rhode Island, WJAR reporter Jim Taricani refused to reveal the source of a surveillance tape leaked to him from the grand jury investigation of corrupt Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci. In 2004, Taricani, who died in 2019, was convicted of criminal contempt and served six months' home confinement. He became a symbol in the fight for legal recognition of the reporter's privilege, and, in his later years, he lectured widely in journalism schools. A First Amendment lecture series at the University of Rhode Island bears his name.

Taricani worked closely with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP). A superb RCFP series on "Secret Justice" in 2004 included a now dated but still highly informative brief on grand jury secrecy, and the RCFP has online a multi-jurisdictional survey on grand jury access.

Brookings has a report on the Fulton County, Georgia, investigation, last updated (2d ed.) November 2022.

Sunshine filters in to Mass. jail with gloomy history

Bristol County, Mass., Sheriff Paul Heroux is seeking to close a jail with a gloomy history, and last week he gave journalists a look inside.

Built in 1888, the Ash Street Jail in New Bedford, Mass., housed Lizzie Borden during the 1893 trial in which she was acquitted of killing her father and stepmother. The "Lizzie Borden House" is a tourist attraction in nearby Fall River, Mass., today. Undoubtedly the site of executions in Bristol County, Ash Street is often said to be the site of the last public hanging in Massachusetts, in 1898. Records conflict (compare O'Neil with O'Neill, and see Barnes), but if it's not, it's close enough. The commonwealth changed its method of execution to the electric chair in 1900.

Purchase St., New Bedford, Mass., 1888.
Whaling Museum photo via New Bedford Guide.

One of the oldest jails in continuous operation in the United States, Ash Street gained new notoriety beginning in the late 20th century, especially after 1997 during the tenure of Sheriff Thomas Hodgson. In 25 years of service as sheriff, after prior service in local politics, Hodgson earned national press for hardline measures such as the removal of televisions and gym equipment from the jail, the imposition of room-and-board charges for detainees, the institution of chain gangs, and an offer of detainee labor to the Trump Administration to help build the border wall.

Meanwhile, Hodgson was unapologetic for conditions within the jail. Former detainees complained of uncontrolled mold, uncontained sewage, and intolerable cold and heat (WBUR). The complaints have been controverted. A former jail official lauded staff and facility in a 2022 letter to the New Bedford Guide, for example, and a news reporter, upon a tour of the facility in 2016, wrote favorably of a modernized interior.

When Heroux toppled Hodgson in the 2022 election, closing the Ash Street Jail was part of his platform.

President Trump and Sheriff Hodgson at the White House, 2019.
Trump White House Archives via Flickr (public domain)

Former Sheriff Hodgson is reminiscent of an infamous character in the annals of freedom of information law, Sheriff Thomas Lafayette Houchins, Jr., of Alameda County, California. Houchins lent his name to Houchins v. KQED, Inc., a 1978 U.S. Supreme Court case regarded generally as standing for the proposition that the First Amendment does not articulate a right of access to public places, if not more broadly foreclosing use of the First Amendment as any kind of freedom of information act.

In my 2012 casebook, Law of Access to Government, I contextualized Houchins with some biographical information about the sheriff (relying on sources such as the East Bay Times).

Thomas Lafayette Houchins, Jr., was a leader in the sheriff 's department in the 1960s and earned a reputation for uncompromising law enforcement. A veteran law enforcement officer, Houchins had joined the department in 1946 after serving in World War II as a Marine Corps fighter pilot. He was elected sheriff in 1975 and retired in 1979. In 1969, Houchins commanded a force of sixty or more deputies in crowd control at what became an infamously tragic concert headlined by the Rolling Stones. He recounted thirty years later: "Some guy jumped off an overpass because somebody told him he could fly. They lied. Another jumped into the [Delta Mendota Canal] because they told him he could swim. They lied to him, too.... I think we had five deaths and five births, so we came out even." Houchins died at his California home in 2005.

The Houchins case centered on news media investigation of the Santa Rita jail. Reporters wanted to tour "Little Greystone," a part of the jail in which "shocking and debasing conditions" were alleged to have caused inmate illnesses and deaths.

Houchins is one of a family of First Amendment access cases in which the Burger Court put the brakes on the liberal interpretations of the First Amendment that characterized the civil rights era. However, to the dismay of President Richard Nixon, who appointed him, Chief Justice Warren Burger was only marginally effective in rallying the Court to reverse the civil rights direction of the predecessor Earl Warren Court.

Houchins reflects that equivocation. Though Houchins's bar review flash card might read simply "no 1A access to public places," the decision came from a fractured Court of only seven justices and an opinion of only three. Harry Blackmun and Thurgood Marshall did not participate, the former having had recent surgery and the latter recusing. Burger was joined by only two others, including his successor as Chief Justice, William Rehnquist, in the opinion of the Court. They formed a majority of four with the addition of Justice Potter Stewart. (Read more about the fracas behind the scenes from Matthew Schafer.)

Concurring, Stewart joined Burger's conclusion on the facts of the case; he had been the author of two prior Court decisions, in 1974, rejecting press access to prisons or prisoners. Yet in his opinion in Houchins, he speculated that media might articulate a First Amendment claim on better facts. With three dissenters arguing at least as much, thus outnumbering the Burger contingent, Houchins arguably left the jailhouse gate open to a First Amendment theory, if you'll forgive the metaphor. Media law aficionados will recognize a pattern akin to Branzburg v. Hayes (1972), in which similar equivocation on the Court, aided later by clever advocacy from media lawyers, left the problem of constitutional reporter's privilege in disarray.

Much of the dispute in Houchins can be characterized as a frame-of-reference problem. In its broadest frame, Houchins is about public access to places to hold public officials accountable. That seems reasonable. But when I teach Houchins, students are quick to find the media position untenable, reading the case more narrowly as about reporters demanding access to any part of the prison, perhaps even with minimal advance notice.

That dichotomy in framing plays out in the public protests and media frustration over access to the Ash Street Jail in recent decades. There were tours; the writer who toured Ash Street in 2016, cited above, was then a reporter for public radio WBUR. Just like in Houchins, protestors and former detainees of the facility complained that public tours were limited and staged, showing reporters only what officials wanted them to see. Officials said that wider public access would jeopardize the security of the facility and the people inside, both detainees and workers.

The theoretical solution that emerged from Houchins, such as the case held, is that supervision of "non-public public places" should be accomplished not through the free press of the First Amendment, but through political accountability at the ballot box. To some degree, that's what happened when Heroux became sheriff in 2022. At the same time, prison conditions raise a peculiar problem in majoritarianism, familiar in criminal justice and civil rights contexts, and resonant in debate today over policing: The political system is not a reliable way to protect the rights of jailed persons, a minority class widely regarded with little sympathy.

On balance, I don't know whether the truth of the Ash Street Jail is closer to the horrifying complaints of former detainees or to the confident assurances of public officials. Whether constitutionally or statutorily, sunshine must be allowed to penetrate prison walls.

Upcoming NFOIC Summit features access all-stars

Access-to-information (ATI, RTK, FOI) enthusiasts are invited and encouraged to attend the online 2022 summit of the National Freedom of Information Coalition on October 18-20.

My FOI seminar class and I will be there.

From the summit home page at Whova, this year's program "will include two hands-on training seminars and over a dozen of sessions this year. Hear real stories from real people, learn the best approaches to enforcing FOI Laws, examine the public's right now in the era of polarization, and more."

Summit participants include experts and champions of transparency, open government, and First Amendment rights. They also include journalists, public employees, govtech and civictech individuals, and anyone who are interested in democracy and accountability."

Speakers include (but are not limited to) some heroes of mine in the academy, notably David Cuillier, University of Arizona; Daxton "Chip" Stewart, Texas Christian University; A, Jay Wagner, Marquette University; Margaret Kwoka, Ohio State University; and Amy Sanders, University of Texas at Austin.

The lineup also features some FOI legends who have worn many hats, including Frank LoMonte, now at CNN and most recently executive director of the Brechner Center; Michael Morisy of MuckRock; Colleen Murphy of the Connecticut FOI Commission; Tom Susman of the American Bar Association and previously of Ropes & Gray; and Daniel Libit, founder of The Intercollegiate and Sportico and tireless advocate for accountability in college athletics.

This year's agenda covers ORA/OMA litigation and enforcement, college athlete publicity rights, messaging apps, doxxing, law enforcement video, legislative transparency, and much more.

I also look forward to seeing the latest research, which wins consideration for publication in the Journal of Civic Information (for which I'm privileged to serve on the Editorial Board).

Registration is affordable and online here. #FOISummit22.

If you've read this far, you might be interested as well in a free public series of online classes recently announced by the New England First Amendment Coalition (NEFAC), "Open Meeting Law: How Newsrooms Respond to Executive Session Secrecy."

Lisbon graffiti writer seeks internet access

I passed this graffiti in the Entrecampos area of Lisbon while attending the annual meeting of the Law and Society Association earlier this month (photo by RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

The text struck me as a curious coupling of "free expression" to excess and an unrealized "right to receive," or right of access to information and the internet.

It looks like someone tried to obliterate the middle section of the text, but as best as I can read it, it says, in whole: "I am a local artist in need of internet connection without any restriction. If you have a network that works and you [are] up for sharing, please text me the [user?] name, password and your approximate address to 969 158 614. In exchange, you(r) might get a poem."

I might have been better persuaded if the writer had asked in rhyme.

Publishers crush state effort to ensure that public libraries have reasonable access to e-books

Cartridge People CC BY 2.0 via Flickr

A Maryland law requiring the licensing of electronic books to public libraries on reasonable terms is preempted by federal copyright law, a federal court ruled in June.

A Maryland statute enacted in 2021 provided that e-book publishers "shall offer to license the electronic literary product to public libraries in the State on reasonable terms that would enable public libraries to provide library users with access to the electronic literary product."

The law meant to answer publishers who have been employing oppressive tactics to milk money from public libraries trying to meet patron demand for electronic books. I wrote some about this problem in April 2021.

Alas, the federal court ruled that federal copyright law occupies the field to the exclusion of Maryland legislators' worthy intentions. The court found it unnecessary, therefore, to consider publisher complainants' further claims, such as dormant Commerce Clause.

I'll add this to my list of lost causes in a corporate-captured Congress.

The case is Association of American Publishers, Inc. v. Frosh (D. Md. June 13, 2022), Judge Deborah L. Boardman presiding.

SCOTUS lets stand First Amendment protection of citizen newsgathering via secret recording of police

Pixabay by Bruce Emmerling

Denying review in November 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand court decisions declaring the Massachusetts wiretap statute unconstitutional as applied to recording police in public places.

I wrote about the original U.S. District Court decision here at The Savory Tort in 2019.  As I commented then, the decision and others like it in the federal courts have broader implications for the First Amendment and the right of access to information.  Historically, American courts have been reluctant to locate access rights in the negative command that Congress make no law abridging the freedom of speech.

But developments in media technology have dimmed the once bright line between information acquisition and expression.  In an age in which one can retweet scarce moments after reading a tweet, government regulation of receipt seems to impinge intolerably on transmission.  Layer on as well a realpolitik of demand for accountability in law enforcement, and the mechanical application of a wiretap prohibition to a smartphone recording of police conduct, or misconduct, becomes indefensible.

Accordingly, civil liberties advocates applauded the district court holding "that secret audio recording of government officials, including law enforcement officials, performing their duties in public is protected by the First Amendment, subject only to reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions."  Bipartisan claimants in the case included Boston-based civil rights activists K. Eric Martin and René Perez, supported by the ACLU of Massachusetts, and conservative activist James O'Keefe and his Project Veritas Action Fund.

In December 2020, the First Circuit mostly affirmed.  U.S. Circuit Judge David J. Barron observed for a unanimous panel that also comprised retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter, sitting by designation, and Senior Judge and Rhode Islander Bruce M. Selya, "Massachusetts makes it as much a crime for a civic-minded observer to use a smartphone to record from a safe distance what is said during a police officer's mistreatment of a civilian in a city park as it is for a revenge-seeker to hide a tape recorder under the table at a private home to capture a conversation with an ex-spouse."

The Massachusetts wiretap law, which is restrictive, requiring all-party consent, but not unique in the states, thus offended the First Amendment insofar as it "prohibit[ed] the secret, non-consensual audio recording of police officers discharging their official duties in public spaces."  In the vein of the changing media landscape and advent of citizen journalism, the First Circuit opined: "In sum, a citizen's audio recording of on-duty police officers' treatment of civilians in public spaces while carrying out their official duties, even when conducted without an officer's knowledge, can constitute newsgathering every bit as much as a credentialed reporter's after-the-fact efforts to ascertain what had transpired."

However, ruling that Project Veritas's purported fear of prospective prosecution failed to prevent a controversy ripe for adjudication, the First Circuit vacated the judgment of the district court insofar as it reached the "secret, non-consensual audio recording of government officials discharging their duties in public" (my emphasis).  That's not to say the principle of the ruling cannot extend beyond police, to other public officials, when there is legitimate public interest in accountability.  Precedent suggests such extension.  But the court was skeptical of the potential reach of an unqualified ruling: "[I]f we ... construe the term 'government officials' as broadly as 'officials and civil servants,' that category covers everyone from an elected official to a public school teacher to a city park maintenance worker."

The First Circuit ruling thus nudges the First Amendment forward in the access arena.  Meanwhile, First Amendment problems lurk ever more menacingly in countervailing privacy law.

At the end of November 2021, Twitter announced a new privacy policy allowing any individual pictured in a tweet to demand takedown, regardless of whether the tweet contains information held private.  There are public-figure and public-interest exceptions.  But generally, images of ordinary persons in public places are imbued with a right of privacy akin to that which animates the European (and increasingly rest-of-the-world) right of personal data protection.

The balanced protection of personal privacy in public places is proving difficult to draw in European courts, which have generated rulings not always savory to the American palate.  My Google Nest Doorbell, for example, facing the public street in Rhode Island, would be problematic under European privacy law.  A private company, Twitter does not have to contend with the First Amendment.  But if the same privacy value and takedown policy were embodied in law, well, as they say in New England, a stahm is a-brewin'.

Both district and circuit courts rejected Project Veritas's facial challenge to the wiretap law.  Project Veritas filed a petition for writ of certiorari in May 2021, and the U.S. Supreme Court denied review in Project Veritas Action Fund v. Rollins, No. 20-1598, on November 22, 2021.  Hat tip to Brian Dowling at Law360.  Cf. Family in fatal police shooting demands transparency, The Savory Tort, Jan. 19, 2022.

In parting meditation on pub gossip, Czech judge peels onion on privacy limits, judicial transparency

Does GDPR pertain to pub buzz?, AG Bobek asks.

(Skeptics in the Pub Oslo (2015) by Dizzi90 CC BY-SA 4.0)

Earlier this month, Czech judge and legal scholar Michal Bobek rounded out a six-year term as an Advocate General (AG) of the European Court of Justice with a mind-bending meditation on the ultimate futility of enforcing data protection law as written and a confirmation of the essentiality of transparency in the courts.

The case on which Bobek opined hardly required a deep dive.  He said so: "This case is like an onion," he wrote.  "I believe that it would be possible, and in the context of the present case entirely justified, to remain at that outer layer.   No peeling of onions unless expressly asked for."

But the case provided Bobek an optimal diving board, and, on the penultimate day of his term as AG, he plunged and peeled.

Complainants in the case were litigants before the Dutch Council of State (Raad van State).  They asserted that disclosure to a journalist of summary case information, from which they could be identified and details of their personal lives worked out, violated their right of privacy under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union, as transposed into Dutch law.

The disclosures are permissible under a GDPR exemption for judicial activities, Bobek concluded.  But en route to that conclusion, he further opined that the potentially unbridled scope of the GDPR must be tamed to accord with social norms and democratic imperatives.

With remarkably plain reasoning, he framed the problem in a comfortable venue:

If I go to a pub one evening, and I share with four of my friends around the table in a public place (thus unlikely to satisfy the private or household activity exception of ... the GDPR) a rather unflattering remark about my neighbour that contains his personal data, which I just received by email (thus by automated means and/or is part of my filing system), do I become the controller of those data, and do all the (rather heavy) obligations of the GDPR suddenly become applicable to me? Since my neighbour never provided consent to that processing (disclosure by transmission), and since gossip is unlikely ever to feature amongst the legitimate grounds listed in ... the GDPR, I am bound to breach a number of provisions of the GDPR by that disclosure, including most rights of the data subject contained in Chapter III.

The pub might not be the only place where the GDPR runs up against a rule of reason.  Consider the more nuanced problem of footballers considering a challenge against the processing of their performance stats.  Goodness; the pub convo will turn inevitably to football.

Let's step back for a second and take stock of the GDPR from the perspective of the American street.

Americans don't get many wins anymore.  We just retreated from a chaotic Afghanistan, despite our fabulously expensive military.  We resist socialized healthcare, but we make cancer patients finance their treatments on Go Fund Me.  We force families into lifelong debt to pay for education, undermining the social mobility it's supposed to provide.  We afford workers zero vacation days and look the other way from the exploitation of gig labor.  Our men's soccer team failed to qualify for the last World Cup and Olympics, while we're not sure why our women are rock stars; it can't be because we pay them fairly.  When it comes to personal privacy, we tend to want it, but our elected representatives seem eager to cede it to our corporate overlords.

Truth be confessed, then, Americans are willing to engage in a smidge of schadenfreude when Europeans—with their peace, their healthcare, their cheap college, their Ryanair Mediterranean vacations, their world-class football, and their g—d— G—D—P—R—get themselves tied up in regulatory knots over something like the sufficient size of a banana.  Ha.  Ha.

Therein lies the appeal, to me, of Judge Bobek's train of thought.  He finds inevitable the conclusion that posting case information is data processing within the purview of the GDPR.  The parties did not even dispute that.  For today, Bobek found an out through the GDPR exemption for the business of the courts in their "judicial capacity."

The out required a stretch to accommodate posting information for journalists, which is not, most strictly speaking, a judicial capacity.  Bobek reasoned by syllogism:  For the courts to do what they do, to act in the judicial capacity, they require judicial independence.  Judicial independence is maintained by ensuring public confidence in the judiciary.  Public confidence in the judiciary is bolstered by transparency in the courts.  Transparency in the courts is facilitated by the provision of case information to journalists.  Therefore, the judicial capacity requires publication of case information to journalists.

The problem, tomorrow, is that there is no answer in the case of pub gossip.  Bobek meditated on the human condition: "Humans are social creatures.  Most of our interactions involve the sharing of some sort of information, often at times with other humans. Should any and virtually every exchange of such information be subject to the GDPR?"

Bobek

Can't be, he concluded.

[I]n my view, I suspect that either the Court, or for that matter the EU legislature, might be obliged to revisit the scope of the GDPR one day. The current approach is gradually transforming the GDPR into one of the most de facto disregarded legislative frameworks under EU law. That state of affairs is not necessarily intentional. It is rather the natural by-product of the GDPR's application overreach, which in turn leads to a number of individuals being simply in blissful ignorance of the fact that their activities are also subject to the GDPR. While it might certainly be possible that such protection of personal data is still able to "serve mankind," I am quite confident that being ignored as a result of being unreasonable does not in fact serve well or even contribute to the authority or legitimacy of any law, including the GDPR.

While we await reassessment of the bounds of data privacy law in modern society, Bobek opined more and mightily on the importance of judicial transparency as a countervailing norm.  He opened the opinion with philosopher-jurist Jeremy Bentham:

"Publicity is the very soul of justice. It is the keenest spur to exertion, and the surest of all guards against impropriety.… It is through publicity alone that justice becomes the mother of security. By publicity, the temple of justice is converted into a school of the first order, where the most important branches of morality are enforced...."

Bobek later picked up the theme:

Judging means individualised detail brought to the public forum....

On the one hand, the basis for judicial legitimacy in an individual case are its facts and details. The judge settles an individual case. His or her job is not to draft abstract, general, and anonymous rules detached from individual facts and situations. That is the job of a legislature. The more a judicial decision departs from or hides the factual background to a public court case, or if it is later reported with significant limitations, the more often it becomes incomprehensible, and the less legitimate it becomes as a judicial decision.

On the other hand, ever since the Roman age, but presumably already earlier, if a claimant asked for the help of the community or later the State to have his claim upheld and enforced by the State, he was obliged to step into the public forum and let his case be heard there. In classical Roman times, the applicant was even entitled to use violence against the respondent who refused to appear in the public (the North Eastern part of the Roman Forum called comitium), before the magistrate (seated on a rolling chair on a tribune higher than the general public—hence indeed tribunal), when called before a court (in ius vocatione).

It is true that, later on, there were other visions of the proper administration of justice and its publicity. They are perhaps best captured by a quote from a judge in the Parlement de Paris writing in 1336 instructions to his junior colleagues, and explaining why they should never disclose either the facts found or the grounds for their decision: "For it is not good that anyone be able to judge concerning the contents of a decree or say 'it is similar or not'; but garrulous strangers should be left in the dark and their mouths closed, so that prejudice should not be caused to others.... For no one should know the secrets of the highest court, which has no superior except God...."

In the modern age, returning to the opening quote of Jeremy Bentham, it is again believed that even garrulous strangers should be allowed to see and understand justice. Certainly, with the arrival of modern technologies, a number of issues must continuously be re-evaluated so that garrulous strangers cannot cause prejudice to others....

Naturally, the publicity of justice is not absolute. There are well-grounded and necessary exceptions. The simple point to keep in mind here is: what is the rule and what is the exception. Publicity and openness must remain the rule, to which naturally exceptions are possible and sometimes necessary. However, unless the GDPR were to be understood as imposing a revival of the best practices of the Parlement de Paris of the 14th century, or other elements of the Ancien Régime or the Star Chamber(s) for that matter, it is rather difficult to explain why, in the name of the protection of personal data, that relationship must now be reversed: secrecy and anonymity were to become the rule, to which openness could perhaps occasionally become the welcome exception.

Bobek seems content with judicial exceptionalism in the GDPR framework.  I'm not so sure.  I rather think the problem of the courts points to the broader problem of GDPR scope.  Will there ultimately be a pub exception, too?  Stubborn American insistence on framing data protection as business regulation, as in California data protection law, suddenly exhibits some appeal.

The case is X v. Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens, No. C-245/20, Opinion of Advocate General Bobek (Oct. 6, 2021).  HT @ Edward Machin, writing in London for Ropes & Gray.

This is not Bobek's first high-profile opinion on the GDPR—even this year.  Read in Fortune about his January opinion in a Facebook case.

State constitutional law offers untapped potential to bolster advocacy in freedom of information

The Vermont Supreme Court relied on the 1777 Vermont
Constitution, as amended in 1786, to support access to
information under the public records act (PRA, or FOIA)
in 2021.

In the summer, two third-year law students published in the Journal of Civic Information a superb investigation highlighting the untapped potential of state constitutional law as a tool in access advocacy in the United States.

Among the many ways in which the U.S. Constitution shows its age is its lack of a right of access to information (ATI). ATI has become a recognized human rights norm in modern constitutions and regional instruments around the world, while the concept in U.S. federal law remains relegated to statute: the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which once was landmark yet today suffers from significant dysfunction. For my own part, I have examined the significance of  this divergence relative to the problem of privatization in the U.S. FOIA and the South African Promotion of Access to Public Information Act (PAIA).  I spoke last month to the U.S. FOIA Advisory Committee re same (HT).

The constitutional lag is not characteristic of all U.S. states.  By the count of University of Florida Levin College of Law students Jessica Terkovich and Aryeh Frank, ATI is recognized in the constitutions of seven states: California, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Montana, New Hampshire, and North Dakota.  In their article, Terkovich and Frank examined case law in these states to see how the constitutional provisions are implicated.

The researchers found that the constitutional provisions were not realizing outcomes in ATI litigation in these states all that different from outcomes that might be reached under the states' statutory expressions of ATI.  Rather than concluding that the constitutional provisions are inconsequential, however, Terkovich and Frank concluded from the evidence that constitutional ATI is under-used as a source of law to bolster access advocacy.

Their reasoning resonates with me.  When I was a newly hatched academic in the 1990s, I was enchanted by an examination copy of a casebook on state constitutional law.  (Lexis and West have current offerings.)  I was never able to swing the course offering, but the subject informed my teaching and research.  Accordingly, I've always encouraged students to consider state constitutional approaches to legal problems.

Often, state high courts recite by rote the default position that they interpret state constitutional rights as merely co-extensive with federal rights; the pairings are construed in pari materia.  The proposition that the free-press-and-speech provision of Article XVI of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights is co-extensive with the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was reiterated recently in the scrap over a Boston flagpole now bound for the U.S. Supreme Court.

Courts might reflexively choose the easier path, shrugging off the burden of state constitutional interpretation.  But they can readily embrace state constitutionalism when it suits their needs.  The Supreme Court of Arkansas long construed the 1874 state constitutional guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure in pari materia with the federal Fourth Amendment.  Until they didn't.  When the U.S. Supreme Court bounced back a state high court disposition as erroneous under the Fourth Amendment, the nonetheless jurisprudentially conservative Arkansas court, in 2002, suddenly discovered distinct meaning in the state constitution to support its earlier conclusion in the defendant's favor.

That result could not have happened if criminal defense lawyer John Wesley Hall had not made the argument.  And that possibility, that the state constitution could mark the difference between liberty and imprisonment, was exactly why Hall included the Hail Mary claim despite longstanding precedent on the in pari materia approach, he once told me.

The potential for potency in a state constitutional claim is all the greater when the right at issue is expressed in the state constitution, but not in the federal Constitution, as is the case for ATI.  And the potential is not limited to the seven states that Terkovich and Frank analyzed.  Just in September, the Vermont Supreme Court extended its ATI law, the Public Records Act (PRA), to shine sunlight on the records of a private contractor responsible for healthcare in state prisons.

Vermont is not on Terkovich and Frank's list of seven.  Nevertheless, in Human Rights Defense Center v. Correct Care Solutions LLC, the Vermont Supreme Court relied on exhortative language—previously held unenforceable by private cause of action—dating to 1786 in the state declaration of rights: "That all power being originally inherent in and co[n]sequently derived from the people, therefore, all officers of government, whether legislative or executive, are their trustees and servants; and at all times, in a legal way, accountable to them."

The article is Jessica Terkovich and Aryeh Frank, Constitutionalizing Access: How Courts Weigh State Constitutional Claims in Open-Government Litigation, 3(1) J. Civic Info. 1 (2021).