Topic: Public Records

SMU First Amendment Clinic argues for disclosure of district attorney emails

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Picture of SMU First Amendment Clinic students, from left, Alex Guerrero, Andrew Killian and Emma Lynch, who represent The Marshall Project in requesting disclosure of information in Ogg v. Paxton.

Above: SMU First Amendment Clinic students, from left, Alex Guerrero, Andrew Killian and Emma Lynch represent The Marshall Project in requesting disclosure of information in Ogg v. Paxton.

A team of students in the First Amendment Clinic at the SMU Dedman School of Law were “in” district court in Texas on April 8 for a summary judgment hearing in Ogg v. Paxton. 

The Clinic represents The Marshall Project in requesting disclosure of information contained in emails called “The Informal” generated by the Harris County District Attorney’s Office. The Texas Attorney General’s Office ruled that the information should be disclosed, and the District Attorney filed a lawsuit to try to stop the release of the information. The Marshall Project intervened.

The 419th Judicial District Court of Travis County, with the Honorable Catherine Mauzy presiding, heard approximately 50 minutes of argument on all parties’ motions for summary judgment and on The Marshall Project’s evidentiary objections. Andrew Killian, a third-year student in the First Amendment Clinic, argued the evidentiary objections.

The Court took the case under advisement.

UC Irvine law students win release of records detailing payouts to victims of law enforcement misconduct

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Note: A version of this post originally appeared on the UC Irvine Intellectual Property, Arts, and Technology Clinic website.

Students at the UC Irvine School of Law won release of hundreds of documents that will shed light on the county’s payments of millions of dollars to victims who sued the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and District Attorney’s Office for misconduct over nearly a decade.

“This is a huge win for the public,” said UCI Adjunct Clinical Law Professor Susan E. Seager in an announcement of the settlement. Professor Seager supervised the law students who sued the county for the documents and reached a settlement requiring release of the documents. “For the first time, the public will be able to see a huge database of documents revealing the names of deputies, prosecutors, and investigators who have been sued in court for breaking the law and the county paid the victims millions of dollars.”

“The documents should also provide details on the allegations against the employees and findings by a jury or judge,” Seager said.

The law school clinic informed the court of the settlement in a court filing Dec. 8.

UCI law students worked on the case for over two years on behalf of their client, the nonprofit Human Rights Defense Center, publisher of Prison Legal News. The students sued the county in Los Angeles County Superior Court earlier this year, claiming the county’s refusal to release the documents violated the California Public Records Act.

UCI law student Dane Brody led the school’s litigation team, with support from students Jenna Cowan and Thomasin Bernhardt, negotiating the settlement with the county’s outside lawyers and attending several virtual court hearings with Professor Seager.

“Having the opportunity to represent HRDC and negotiate with the county throughout the semester to obtain a favorable settlement agreement has been one of the most memorable and rewarding experiences during my time at UC Irvine School of Law,” Dane said. “The work I have done with the clinic has really allowed me to step into the shoes of a practicing attorney, and I look forward to carrying on a robust pro bono practice in my own career in the future.”

The students provided free legal services to the publisher of Prison Legal News, as well as for other independent and nonprofit journalist organizations and open government groups, as part of their work in the Press Freedom and Transparency practice in the law school’s Intellectual Property, Arts, and Technology law clinic.

Human Rights Defense Center Executive Director Paul Wright said the settlement will give the public crucial information about these payouts. “Taxpayers have a right to know what police and jail abuse is costing them in terms of money as well as the human cost,” Wright said. “We hope that making the information publicly available will inform the public on where their tax dollars are going and the need for progressive change in both policing and jail management alike.”

From 2019 to 2021, UC Irvine law students Madeline Knutson, Myles West, Roxanne Markus, Hedyeh Tirgardoon, and Bria Watson sent numerous letters asking the county to voluntarily release the documents under the Public Records Act, conducted negotiations, and performed other work on the case. After the county repeatedly refused to release the documents, law student Sabrina Victor and Benjamin Whittle drafted the lawsuit and the clinic filed it on April 29, 2021.

The lawsuit, Human Rights Defense Center v. County of Los Angeles, Los Angeles Superior Court Case No. 21STCP01342, alleged that the county violated the state’s Public Records Act by refusing to turn over a decade of its settlement agreements resolving administrative claims and lawsuits against the Sheriff’s Department and District Attorney’s Office. The lawsuit said that the county was required to turn over copies of the claims, lawsuits, jury verdicts, and court judgments for each settled case under the Public Records Act. Under the settlement, the county will release nearly all the documents sought by the Human Rights Defense Center, dating from 2013 to present. The organization had been asking for the records for the past 10 years without success until the law clinic stepped in.

The county told the law students that it would be an “undue burden” for the county to locate all the documents, and that they should go to court and look up the hundreds of lawsuits. But the lawsuit argued that the public has a right to get copies of the documents already collected by the county. Seager said that the settlement agreements are not typically filed in court and could only be obtained from the county.

At the first hearing on the case on August 5, 2021, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge James Chalfant told the county that it didn’t have a very strong undue burden defense, and the two sides immediately began settlement talks, Seager said.

Judge Chalfant signed an order last week stating that he will maintain jurisdiction over the case until the county finishes releasing the documents, which is expected to take nine months.

“It’s a shame that we had sue the county to get these documents,” Seager said. “We call on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to start posting all county settlement agreements and related court documents involving the Sheriff’s Department and DA on a public website to put government transparency into practice.”

The county admitted no wrongdoing, but agreed that the Human Rights Defense Center is the “prevailing party,” which means that the county is required to reimburse the Human Rights Defense Center’s and the UCI law clinic for their attorney’s fees and costs after all the documents are produced. The amount of the attorney’s fees and costs has not been settled.

Prison Legal News, which is distributed to prisoners across the nation to provide education about prisoners’ legal rights, plans to publish the settlement agreements and related documents online so that the public can have easy access.

The documents will be made publicly available on two Human Rights Defense Center websites: www.prisonlegalnews.org and www.criminallegalnews.org.

Cornell Clinic files lawsuit in support of Vermont Journalism Trust’s efforts to obtain records

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Suit challenges broad ‘litigation exemption’ of state’s public records law

MONTPELIER — Represented by Cornell Law School’s First Amendment Clinic and the ACLU, the Vermont Journalism Trust filed a public records lawsuit October 29 to obtain additional records related to the still unresolved EB-5 scandal. The State of Vermont is again withholding EB-5 records, citing the “litigation exemption” under Vermont’s Public Records Act — an exemption state agencies have relied on repeatedly to prevent public disclosure.  

Heather Murray, Managing Attorney of the Local Journalism Project, Cornell First Amendment Clinic: “Today’s suit aims to bolster VTDigger’s excellent investigative reporting on this major financial fraud by challenging the State’s broad interpretation of the litigation exemption, which may be shielding from the public valuable information about how much the State knew about this fraud prior to taking action.” Associate Clinic Director Cortelyou Kenney and law students Haylei John, Michael Mills, and Brian Marte provided critical assistance in preparing the complaint. 

Since 2012, the Vermont Journalism Trust, operating as VTDigger, has reported on the State’s oversight of the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Visa Program, a federal program designed to create jobs and stimulate foreign capital investment in low-income regions. In August of 2020, VTDigger requested documents from the Agency of Commerce and Community Development (“ACCD”), which operated the Vermont EB-5 Regional Center, to understand why the State continued to endorse the solicitation of investors for EB-5 projects despite increasing evidence of fraud. ACCD denied that request on September 29, resulting in this lawsuit.

Lia Ernst, senior staff attorney, ACLU of Vermont: “The EB-5 scandal shows the need for more transparent and accountable government, and that is exactly what Vermont’s public records law is designed to promote. When the government misapplies that law to keep the public in the dark, our state and our democracy suffer.”

The EB-5 program allows foreign entrepreneurs who make specified financial investments in the United States to apply for lawful permanent resident status. In April 2016, the State and the federal Securities Exchange Commission filed civil suits against several individuals and corporate entities alleged to have misused, in a “Ponzi-like” scheme, more than $200 million of these investor funds marked for projects in Vermont.

Timothy Cornell of Cornell Dolan, P.C., counsel for the Vermont Journalism Trust: “The State of Vermont continues to hide secrets behind narrow exemptions, frustrating the intent and purpose of the state’s public records law. The EB-5 scandal demonstrates the need to reject broad exemptions to public disclosure and do more to increase transparency in government.” This lawsuit is the latest in a series of cases brought by Vermont Journalism Trust in its ongoing investigation of the EB-5 scandal. In 2019, Mr. Cornell, the Cornell First Amendment Clinic, and Tarrant, Gillies, Richardson & Shems LLP represented the Vermont Journalism Trust in similar litigation that resulted in the release of documents the State had previously withheld.  In 2016, the ACLU & Mr. Cornell represented the Vermont Journalism Trust in public records litigation after the State withheld other EB-5 records, claiming that they fell within an exemption for records that “are relevant to litigation to which the public agency is a party of record.” That lawsuit was settled in 2017, after the state finally agreed to release the records. 

Read the complaint here.

University at Buffalo clinic prevails in Niagara County public records case

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Note: A version of this post originally appeared on the University at Buffalo School of Law website.

BUFFALO, N.Y. — Represented by the Civil Rights & Transparency Clinic at the University at Buffalo School of Law, the New York Coalition for Open Government won a lawsuit against Niagara County that requires the release of years of financial disclosures of county officials.

On Sept. 10, 2020, Supreme Court Justice Frank Caruso invalidated Niagara County’s local laws that blocked potential financial conflicts from disclosure by elected officials since 1996.

Judge Caruso ordered the county to release all financial disclosures from Niagara County legislators since 2013. These documents contain information about elected officials’ businesses, investments, property and outside employment. Subject to public view for the first time in 24 years, the ruling allows the press and public to assess whether legislators have financial conflicts that may influence their decision-making.

“Niagara County legislators withheld these documents because they valued their own privacy over the public’s right to know. We’re pleased with the court’s ruling that validates our client’s long-held position that these were public documents that could not be kept secret,” said Michael Higgins, assistant director of the Civil Rights & Transparency Clinic, who argued the motion.

“We’re committed to bringing cases that law firms may not be able to accept,” said Heather Abraham, the clinic’s director. “For years, Niagara County was able to conceal potential financial conflicts of its elected officials, all because the average person does not have the time and money to challenge these laws in court. Our litigation realigns the power imbalance between the government and public citizens. We will continue to fight to promote government transparency in our region.”

The Civil Rights & Transparency Clinic is a litigation clinic at the University at Buffalo School of Law. Its mission is to advance justice through litigation and policy advocacy that protects civil rights and civil liberties, and makes government more transparent.

The clinic’s mission is supported by the Legal Clinic Fund, a collaborative fund that supports the growth and sustainability of legal clinics across the United States that seek to advance and defend first amendment rights, media freedom, and transparency in their communities and nationally. The fund is generously supported by Democracy Fund, Heising-Simons Foundation, and The Klarman Family Foundation. The Miami Foundation serves as fiscal sponsor for the fund.

Cornell First Amendment Clinic files suit seeking wage theft documents

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Cornell Law School’s First Amendment Clinic filed a lawsuit in state court on Monday seeking wage theft-related records from the New York State Department of Labor on behalf of immigration-focused nonprofit news site Documented. 

Documented plans to use the requested documents to create an interactive database of companies in New York that have stolen wages from employees. That database would be accessible both to low-wage workers at particular risk of experiencing wage theft and to those who support a living wage to determine which companies to avoid working for or patronizing.

Wage theft is a widespread problem in New York. In recent years, unscrupulous employers stole an estimated $965 million annually from New York employees, according to an Economic Policy Institute report. 

“It is crucial that records identifying employers’ bad actions be made public in a timely manner both to hold employers accountable and to further the Department of Labor’s aim of protecting workers,” said Heather Murray, Managing Attorney of the Clinic’s Local Journalism Project.

Murray pointed out that the federal Department of Labor already publicly posts the type of wage theft information that Documented is seeking, including whether violations were found, the back wage amount, the number of employees due back wages and the civil monetary penalties assessed.

Documented filed the original request under the state’s Freedom of Information Law in December 2019. The suit challenges the improper delay and constructive denial of access to the requested wage and hour records.

A copy of the Petition is available here, and the supporting Brief can be accessed here.

The Clinic is engaged in a variety of cases and projects advancing the interests of free speech and freedom of the press. Its recently launched Local Journalism Project addresses the increasing void in legal representation facing newsgatherers and media outlets that would otherwise be precluded from engaging in expensive litigation to defend their rights and ability to do their jobs. The Clinic’s work extends across disciplines, impacting journalists, researchers, human rights advocates, political advocates and other individuals targeted based on their expression.

Cyberlaw Clinic files amicus brief on behalf of journalists supporting firearms database transparency

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Note: A version of this post originally appeared on the Cyberlaw Clinic’s blog.

The Harvard Cyberlaw Clinic filed an amicus brief (pdf) last week in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on behalf of a group of data journalists and media organizations, advocating for greater access to government records stored in databases under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

The brief supports the plaintiff-appellee Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund (Everytown) in an appeal arising out of a FOIA request submitted by Everytown to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). This is the second brief the Clinic has filed on this topic, the first being filed in Spring 2019 in the case CIR v. DOJ.

The ATF hosts a database known as the Firearms Trace System, or FTS. The FTS contains data about the source and movement of firearms recovered by federal, state and local law enforcement. Everytown requested records containing data on successful traces for firearms used in suicides and suicide attempts, aggregated along several axes including state and time period. Everytown specifically requested aggregate data because the ATF’s history of relying on the Tiahrt Amendment, a rider contained in annual appropriations acts from 2003 to 2012 that prohibits disclosure of firearm trace information to non-law enforcement requesters, but allows the release of “statistical aggregate data.”

The ATF did invoke the Tiahrt Amendment, but also claimed that it was not obligated to release aggregate records because doing so would constitute creation of a new record, which is not required of agencies under the FOIA. The ATF outline a detailed process that involved not only locating and producing the responsive records, but also cleaning up the data, filling in missing data points, and producing data visualizations. The ATF argued that these steps exceed what was required under the FOIA.

The District Court for the Southern District of New York found in favor of Everytown, ruling both that the Tiahrt Amendment did not constitute a proper basis for a FOIA exemption and that production of the requested data did not require creation of new records. The ATF then appealed to the Second Circuit.

The amicus brief submitted by the Clinic focuses on the new records question, arguing that access to aggregate data in a database does not require creation of a new record because it uses the same functions as access to individual data points–a task the ATF recognizes is required under the FOIA. The brief provides a brief explainer on the nature of databases and notes that, contrary to the ATF’s argument, there is no technical difference between searching for “raw” data or “aggregate” data. It goes on to argue that there should, therefore, be no legal difference between the two.

The brief also addresses the ATF’s attempt to inflate the time required to respond the Everytown’s request by including data clean up and visualization work, neither of which would be conducted in response to a typical FOIA request. Finally, the brief points out the negative consequences of the ATF’s restrictive view of the FOIA, which would require requesters, agencies and courts alike to have detailed technical knowledge of agency databases in order to make, process and review FOIA requests.

Amici on the brief include:

  • MuckRock, a journalism and government transparency nonprofit that has helped thousands of requesters around the United States better file, share and understand freedom of information requests;
  • The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, an unincorporated nonprofit association whose attorneys provide pro bono legal representation, amicus curiae support and other legal resources to protect First Amendment freedoms and the newsgathering rights of journalists;
  • Dana Amihere, data editor at Southern California Public Radio (KPCC/LAist);
  • Meredith Broussard, an associate professor at the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and author of “Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World”;
  • Stephen K. Doig, a senior faculty member of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University; and
  • Jeff South, a retired professor from Virginia Commonwealth University who specializes in data journalism.

The Cyberlaw Clinic is honored to have represented these amici and hopes the Second Circuit Court of Appeals will take into account their expertise. The brief was written by Spring 2020 clinical students Sarah Alawi, Stephany Bai and Lauren Yonkoski with supervision from Clinical Instructor Mason Kortz.

Buffalo transparency clinic wins access to local jails’ records on suicide attempts

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The University at Buffalo School of Law Civil Liberties and Transparency Clinic, a Free Expression Legal Network member, successfully sued the Erie County Sheriff recently on behalf of the National Lawyers Guild Buffalo Chapter for access to the records of Buffalo’s local jails concerning suicide attempts by inmates.

The resulting records revealed that the sheriff, who runs the county’s jails, mischaracterized suicide attempts in the jails as “inmate disturbances” or “manipulative gestures.” This means that the jails failed to properly report suicide attempts to the state’s oversight commission, and the National Lawyers Guild argues it could frustrate attempts to prevent future suicides.

The clinic and the National Lawyers Guild won a near complete victory in the litigation, brought under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, in the trial court last fall. Among other things, the Court ordered the jail to turn over reports documenting incidents in the jails, internal policies and procedures, and relevant emails. As a result of the sheriff’s refusal to voluntarily release any documents, the clinic also won $27,000 in attorney’s fees.

The Sheriff’s Office has paid the attorney’s fees and produced many of the documents that were ordered released. It is appealing the lower court’s ruling, however, with respect to any emails.

The National Lawyers Guild argues that this appeal prevents it and the public from determining the full scope of the mischaracterization of suicide attempts in Buffalo’s jails. This issue is especially urgent because there has been a string of more than two dozen suicide deaths at the local jails in recent years, as The Buffalo News has written. More broadly, the jails have been cited as among the “worst offenders” for violations of state law by the state oversight commission.

A local reporter, Matt Spina, has covered the local jails for years. He assisted in this litigation by providing background on the jails’ past records practices and explaining the importance of the documents to the court. In an affidavit, Spina noted that it is “difficult or impossible to properly report stories” concerning local jails without the types of documents this lawsuit uncovered. The Buffalo News continues to publish stories about the litigation and also wrote an editorial strongly supporting the lawsuit and condemning the sheriff for appealing the order.

The clinic continues to represent the National Lawyers Guild in the appeal.

Clinics help transparency advocates win victory for public access to clinical trial data

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Note: A version of this post originally appeared on Yale Law School’s website.

A ruling from a federal judge on February 24, 2020, will dramatically expand the public’s right to access results of clinical trials studying drugs and medical devices. The ruling is the latest development in a lawsuit brought by the Yale Media Freedom and Information Access (MFIA) and NYU Technology Law & Policy (TLP) Clinics on behalf of Charles Seife and Dr. Peter Lurie, with the support of the Yale Collaboration for Research Integrity and Transparency (CRIT).

Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald of the Southern District of New York held that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have misinterpreted a 2007 law that requires drug companies, universities, and other sponsors of clinical trials to disclose the results of clinical trials of FDA-approved products to the public via the ClinicalTrials.gov website.

The court’s order requires the government to collect and post about a decade’s worth of trial results that should be public under the 2007 law — making data from potentially hundreds of clinical trials available for the first time. “This is an extraordinary victory for patients and clinical trial researchers,” said Joseph Ross, Professor of Medicine and Public Health and faculty co-director of Yale CRIT. “The government now has a clear legal obligation to enforce these reporting requirements, and by doing so it will promote more fully-informed decision-making by patients and their clinicians.”  

Background on ClinicalTrials.gov and the need for clinical trial data

High-quality medical care requires high-quality evidence. But sponsors of clinical trials that investigate the safety and efficacy of medical products don’t always publish their results where doctors and patients can find them, according to the clinic. Instead, sponsors may “cherry-pick” data by publishing favorable clinical trial results and keeping secret unfavorable results.

“Recognizing this problem, Congress enacted the Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act (FDAAA) to ensure a flow of clinical trial evidence to patients, clinicians, and researchers through the public ClinicalTrials.gov website,” said Christopher Morten, supervising attorney at the TLP Clinic. “Yet NIH and HHS promulgated a rule and an interpretation of FDAAA that created an illegal ‘loophole.’” As MFIA student Simon Brewer explained, “the loophole purported to exempt many clinical trials of FDA-approved products completed between 2007 and 2017 from any obligation to ever report their results to ClinicalTrials.gov.” 

Seife emphasized the importance of the law: “The FDA is in charge of making sure that drugs on the market are safe and effective, but without access to data about those drugs, it’s nearly impossible to understand whether the agency is doing its job properly. ClinicalTrials.gov is a key source of this data.”

The MFIA-TLP lawsuit on behalf of Seife and Lurie

Seife and Lurie are two leading researchers on clinical trials whose research has been hindered by the absence of information on ClinicalTrials.gov. Seife is an investigative journalist at NYU whose work focuses on science and technology. Lurie is a family physician, president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and a former associate commissioner of the FDA.

In December 2018, MFIA filed suit on Seife and Lurie’s behalf. The suit sought to close the loophole and requested a declaration that NIH’s and HHS’s interpretation of FDAAA was inconsistent with the statute. Brewer argued Seife and Lurie’s case in court on February 11, 2020.

Judge Buchwald’s decision, issued on February 24, was a victory for Seife and Lurie on their loophole claim. The court concluded that “FDAAA unambiguously requires responsible parties [i.e., trial sponsors] to submit, and defendants to include on ClinicalTrials.gov,” results for loophole trials and therefore that “HHS’s contrary interpretation . . . is unlawful and must be set aside.”

“Judge Buchwald’s decision will help ensure that these government agencies and the drug and device industries are jointly held to account, and that the promise of the clinicaltrials.gov database be finally fulfilled,” said Lurie. “True transparency requires that all results of clinical trials be truthfully reported, be they positive, negative, or somewhere in between — and even in cases where the study sponsors or FDA would prefer not to disclose.”

The court also held that it could not grant relief on a separate claim, which asked for an order requiring NIH to post public notices of noncompliance whenever sponsors fail to submit results. Seife and Lurie are considering a potential appeal of this claim with their legal team.

Besides Brewer and Morten, Seife and Lurie’s legal team also included John Langford ’14, Adam Pan ’18, Jennifer Pinsof, and David Schulz ’78 of MFIA and Jason Schultz of the TLP Clinic. The lawsuit was conceived and supported throughout by CRIT members, including Alex Egilman, Gregg Gonsalves, Amy Kapczynski ’03, Harlan Krumholz, Shweta Kumar, Margaret McCarthy, Jennifer Miller, Joe Ross, and Joshua Wallach, and was further supported by Merith Basey of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines.

MFIA is a student clinic at Yale Law School dedicated to increasing government transparency and advancing the public’s right of access to information. TLP is a student clinic at NYU School of Law focused on issues at the intersection of technology, law, and social justice. The Collaboration for Research Integrity and Transparency (CRIT) is an interdisciplinary initiative launched in 2016 to enhance the quality and transparency of the research base for medical products. CRIT has received funding from Arnold Ventures. The lawsuit does not represent the institutional views of Yale University or NYU.  

Clinic coalition leads effort to limit Supreme Court’s ruling in Food Marketing Institute

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The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2019 decision Food Marketing Institute v. Argus Leader (FMI) dramatically changed the landscape of the Freedom of Information Act’s (FOIA) Exemption 4 for “confidential” “commercial or financial” “information.” But a coalition of transparency clinics — led by Cornell Law School’s First Amendment Clinic in tandem with Yale’s Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic as well as co-counsel from Vinson & Elkins’s Tom Leatherbury — is pushing back in a case in the Southern District of New York.

These clinics represent science journalist Charles Seife, who argued in summary judgment papers in September and December in front of Judge Furman that 2016 FOIA amendments limit the scope of the Food Marketing Institute decision, and that even under the Supreme Court’s new test, Seife should prevail in his efforts to obtain critical information related to the efficacy of an important FDA-approved drug.

The coalition argues that the textualist approach employed by the court in FMI applies equally to a new standard, enacted by Congress in 2016, known as the “foreseeable harm” requirement — an issue not considered in FMI, which involved a 2011 FOIA request prior to the effective date of these amendments. This standard requires agencies to reasonably foresee a harm from disclosure of the sought-after information before blocking its release.

In Seife’s case, neither the government (specifically, the FDA and HHS) nor the private intervenor-defendant (a drug company known as Sarepta Therapeutics) meaningfully engaged on the issue of whether there was a finding of foreseeable harm in this case, arguing instead that FMI decided issues related to the foreseeable harm standard even though they were never presented to the Supreme Court.

Seife also makes other important arguments:  That the 2016 amendments baked into FOIA a public interest in “knowing what the government is up to” as well as a rigorous and meaningful standard for the new FMI test that does not simply allow the government to state that information is “confidential” to render it so.

The case is now fully submitted to Judge Furman, and the clinics are awaiting a decision.

“I’m incredibly grateful to the team for fighting so long and hard on this case,” Seife said. “Journalists, especially freelancers, often don’t have the resources to fight in court for information withheld by the government. In this case, however, Yale and Cornell and Vinson & Elkins have made it possible to push for documents that are important for the public to understand not just what the government is doing behind the scenes when it approves drugs, but also crucial to understanding the safety and effectiveness of new medications.”

Read more from the clinics’ filings in the case:

Photo by Joe Ravi is licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

UC Irvine’s IPAT Clinic wins disclosure of child services records

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This post originally appeared on the IPAT Clinic’s website on September 16, 2019.

Students from the UCI Intellectual Property, Arts, and Technology Clinic won disclosure of government records earlier this year, revealing how social workers failed to protect a 10-year-old Los Angeles boy from years of alleged physical abuse, eventually ending with his death and murder charges being filed against his mother and her boyfriend.

The clinic’s client, journalist Garrett Therolf, published a lengthy story about the boy, Anthony Avalos, in the Los Angeles Times on September 4 based in part on the documents obtained by UCI students.

Students Cassie Doutt, Shanxi Feng, and Emily Asgari filed a petition with the Los Angeles Superior Court’s juvenile court division in March 2019 on behalf of Therolf, a staff writer at the UC Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program, asking the court to unseal records from the LA Department of Children and Family Services detailing years of alleged abuse of young Anthony.  In July, a judge ordered most of the records unsealed, and Garrett was provided the documents in late August.

The students are part of the IPAT Clinic’s Press Freedom and Transparency practice, headed by UCI Staff Attorney Susan E. Seager, providing pro bono legal services to journalists, documentary filmmakers, and others.

Photo by Mathieu Marquer is licensed under CC BY 2.0