firstamendment

2007 Open Government Legislative Roundup: Some successes and some failures By Nick Rahaim The 2007 legislative session started with a host of promising bills that would have created more transparency and would have reversed recent judicial and Attorney General opinions permitting excessive secrecy. There were some successes and some disappointments. The major disappointment was the failure to overturn the 2006 state Supreme Court decision in Copley Press v. Superior Court, which effectively sealed all police

In their handling of controversy surrounding Chemerinsky and Summers, UC’s leaders showed themselves unable or unwilling to defend academic freedom By Peter Scheer The best that can be said about the University of California’s leaders is that they are neutral in their spinelessness: in the face of political pressure, they are quick to surrender the university’s academic freedom–its lifeblood—whether that pressure comes from the ideological right or the left. From the right, UC-Irvine was criticized

Watershed CA Supreme Court decision is major win for government transparency. A stunning end to the media’s 20-year losing streak in high court access cases. By Peter Scheer America’s highest courts are justly criticized for avoiding hard issues. The judicial fetish for deciding cases on the narrowest possible grounds yields opinions so limited and unambitious in scope that they often raise more questions, and generate more legal disputes, than they resolve. Exceptions are the rare

It starts again: A Washington, DC judge has ordered 5 journalists to name their confidential sources for stories about the anthrax letters of 2001 By Peter Scheer Just when you thought it was safe again for journalists to talk to confidential sources inside government, a federal judge in Washington, DC has ordered five prominent reporters—Allan Lengel of the Washington Post; Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman, both of Newsweek; Toni Locy, formerly of USA Today; and