This Article confronts a dangerous contemporary trend: the political harassment of public university professors by activists on the right and left, through the mechanism of open records requests. It is timed to a moment when universities and state legislatures are grappling with the consequences of escalating public-records intrusion into scholars’ work that threatens enterprises as diverse as climate change research and biomedical experiments.
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In the past decade, scholars in states with broad open records laws have increasingly received harassing records requests from requesters politically or economically threatened by the intellectual work they seek to reveal. Such requests undermine the peer review process and the communications through which scholars explore and contest ideas, impairing the core intellectual functions of the university. Equally worrisome, harassing record requests chill research on critical contemporary issues — a knowledge-generation role of universities that is essential to a democracy, which depends on an informed citizenry.
[P]rofessors should never have been subject to public records laws in the first instance, both because they are not engaged in public governance, and because open records laws are fundamentally incompatible with academic freedom. It further argues that the best way to stanch the present records request intrusion into scholars’ work is to create a broad scholar-records exemption from existing state laws.Editor’s note: Claudia Polsky is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Environmental Law Clinic at UC Berkeley Law
Read full, original post: Open Records, Shuttered Labs: Ending Political Harassment of Public University Researchers
