Asked & Answered

Q: I am currently a high school student and I am also a minor. Due to the COVID-19 crisis, our school is online and we are using a website called Office 365 and Teams, which is provided by the school. I have changed my profile picture on those websites to an LGBT flag being burned. A student complained about my profile picture and a teacher told me to take it down and I respectfully told

Q: I’ve attended some meetings of a local government in California recently and they’ve started using Zoom to conduct the meetings because of the local COVID-19 public health orders. I’ve set up my Zoom sign-on to identify me as “John Q. Public,” which as you can probably guess isn’t my real name. But they do know who I am. However, at the beginning of the Zoom meetings the district secretary has gotten into the habit

Q: A school district in California is refusing to disclose the amounts paid to outside legal counsel to defend itself in a federal lawsuit filed by a school board member. District officials are citing the appellate decision in LA County Board of Supervisors v. Superior Court as supporting case law. Have you encountered this defense? Is it legitimate? A: Attorney-client privilege is an exemption to the California Public Records Act (the “CPRA”), and it is

Q: I have had a long-running battle with the county’s Community Development Agency on them altering Tax Assessor real estate records in order to approve an out-of-proportion large new house construction. CDA rules dictate new houses have to be average to the neighborhood. What CDA did was inflate the neighborhood average size, the part that is taxed, to make their project appear average. It took my California Public Records Act requests to expose some of

Q: I have been conducting academic research in the “Zodiac Killer” case from the late 1960s and early 1970s. As part of my research, I have made several requests for police files and records from that time in relation to that case. However, I have found the local law enforcement to be uncooperative and often uncommunicative. In a number of my public records requests, they have used legal semantics and a vague interpretation of the