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Although most states treat e-mail messages exchanged by government employees like any other government records, Hawaii has no laws that require state officials to actually preserve or maintain such messages -- even if they would otherwise be considered government records.
In its beaver-like stockpiling of government data, handy for quick dispensation to journalists, the non-profit group Investigative Reporters and Editors has for years kept updated copies of one National Inventory of Dams.
In it: the locations of dams, their proximity to populous places and the results of recent safety inspections.
North Carolina legislators are considering legislation that would allow park and public recreation facilities to deny requests for information on children participating in their programs.
The bill allows for the removal of the children’s names, parental information, birth dates, telephone numbers, and addresses from government documents that are considered public records.
Open records laws in both Tennessee and Rhode Island have been significantly bolstered in the past week.
Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen signed into law Thursday a statute that requires state records custodians to respond to records requests within seven days -- the first time Tennessee law has mandated such deadlines.
The Wisconsin Court of Appeals encouraged the state Supreme Court on Tuesday to review whether the Legislature violated the state’s open records law when it approved union contracts that kept state employees’ names from being publicly released.
The higher court will now decide whether to take the case.
A county circuit judge ruled in favor of the newspapers in 2006.
Despite 20 years of compliance with the Freedom of Information Act, a federal judge ruled Monday that the White House's Office of Administration is not subject to FOIA and can withhold internal paperwork on the disappearance of thousands of e-mail messages.
A circuit judge in Sarasota County on Friday ordered three public officials to stop using their personal computers and turn them over so an expert can determine if they contain public information. In his decision, Circuit Judge Robert Bennett held that private computers can be confiscated to search for public records.
In a unanimous decision, the U.S. Supreme Court today rejected an attempt to place new limits on the right to request federal agency documents after a rejection of the same request had already been unsuccessfully litigated by another party.
Sens. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) introduced a bill Tuesday aimed at expanding the reach of recently enacted measures designed to make federal spending more transparent.
Two local newspapers that have been covering the ongoing saga of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his alleged relationship with his former chief of staff, Christine Beatty, may request hard-copies of email, text messages and other electronic communications between the two going back to last August, a Wayne County Circuit judge ruled Friday.
