A brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court reflects exasperation with colleges' unwillingness to honor legal researchers' requests for public records. As one law professor tells The Chronicle of Higher Education, "We find in our surveys substantially more stonewalling over the past two years" when state universities are asked to produce documents about their admissions standards.
College journalism professor Steve Listopad is the 2015 winner of the Hefner Foundation's award for outstanding contributions to the First Amendment by an educator. Listopad worked with six of his students at the University of Jamestown on crafting what became North Dakota's John Wall New Voices Act, one of the strongest laws in the country protecting student journalists and advisers.
Thursday, Sept. 17, is Constitution Day, when all schools must set aside time to teach about constitutional principles. For Constitution Day 2015, the SPLC has created a classroom lesson plan to get young people talking about the nation's newest student-rights statute, the New Voices of North Dakota Act, and how it fortifies their federally protected First Amendment rights.
A police department in Reserve, Pa., tried to stop a public-records requester from making his own duplicates of government expense-account documents. But the state open-records commission, adding Pennsylvania to a growing list of states, says there's a legal right to take pictures of government documents.
Indiana's attorney general has thrown the state's influential weight behind a lawsuit seeking access to police records at Notre Dame, whose attorneys claim the private institution is exempt from the state public-records act. Sports network ESPN is trying to make Indiana the third state this year to declare private-college police reports open for public inspection.
Some observers have predicted that the end of the unpaid internship is not far away — here's a summary and an analysis of the recent legal developments.
Two former "American Idol" contestants waited too long to file their defamation suit against the parent company of MTV and VH1, a federal appeals court decides. The ruling is the latest to apply the "single publication rule" to an article continuously available on a news website. The decision should be reassuring to online publishers -- but with some important cautions.
A North Carolina school board tried to withhold the minutes of a closed-door discussion about the school superintendent's employment contract, claiming the minutes were a "personnel record." But a state appeals court disagreed. The ruling is a reminder that, despite what school lawyers often insist, not everything about personnel decisions is off-limits to journalists' scrutiny.
A federal appeals court allowed student plaintiffs to go forward with due process and First Amendment challenges to the state of Arizona's decision to eliminate "ethnic studies" courses from the K-12 curriculum. The court's 3-0 decision is remarkable for recognizing that students have a constitutionally protected right to receive information even in the classroom setting, a principle that may strengthen the hand of future student plaintiffs.
A recent court ruling puts Pennsylvania in the majority camp of states that have judicially recognized a right of public access to videos shot by automated cameras on police-car dashboards. Dash-cam videos have at times helped exposed police wrongdoing, though opponents argue that the videos can needlessly embarrass those being stopped by police.