The Virginia Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision that the University of Virginia did not have to release the e-mails of climate scientist Michael Mann formerly a professor at the university. The lower court had ruled that the e-mails were of a “proprietary” nature and thereby exempt from disclosure under the state’s Freedom of Information Act. (Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, April 17 2014, by Emily Grannis)
The Supreme Court said that releasing the e-mails would put the university at a competitive disadvantage. The Energy &Environment Legal Institute that disputes the science of climate change brought the suit seeking the e-mails. (Chemical and Engineering News, April 17, 2014, by Cheryl Hogue)
Media interests supporting the institute in their quest for the e-mails said the decision to make the e-mails exempt from disclosure would remove “almost all public documents from the ambit of the records law.” Michael Halpern of the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote in favor of the court’s decision, “…demanding private email correspondence among scientists is the 21st Century [is] equivalent to eavesdropping on conversations around the water cooler. All of us need safe space to develop ideas and open them up to scrutiny so that we can make them better.” (The Scientist, April 22, 2014, by Kerry Grens)
Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, April 23, 2014, Alexis Sobel Fitts says that while the Virginia Supreme Court decision protected scientists from those who cherry pick information to discredit research, the decision adversely affects journalists by exempting budget information from the FOIA.