This, from a Courier Journal reporter, reminded me of a quotation from a 1976 opinion — written just after the enactment of the open records law — that I often used in the open records decisions I wrote:
"Public agencies may put into their regulations the requirement for written application but we believe it is contrary to the letter and spirit of the open records law for an agency to make it more difficult to inspect a public record than it was before the open records law was enacted. Records which are easily described and readily available should not be temporarily withheld from inspection by red tape under the pretense of complying with the open records law."
Unless you have access to WestLaw or Lexis, you won't easily find the original opinion in which this quotation appears.
The Office of the Attorney General posted the open records decisions back to 1993 (and part of 1992) on the agency website in the mid-90s. The office has continued to post all current open records decisions.
But no successful effort was thereafter made to post the pre-1990's open records/meetings opinions.
Perhaps the technological challenges were too great or sufficient funds were unavailable.
But what this means is that the legal foundation of the open records and meetings laws is unavailable to the public. There have been many changes to the laws since the seventies, but the unavailability of these early opinions is unfortunate.
Before automated research, I spent hours manually pouring over the written annotations to the open records and open meetings laws looking for a guiding precedent on a particular legal issue.
This was not the most efficient way to do research, but no other alternative existed.
The benefits of manual research cannot be overstated. In reading the summaries of those early opinions again and again, the governing principles became ingrained and directed me in my interpretation of the laws from 1991 to 2016.
This should be mandatory reading for all attorneys — not just assistant attorneys general — tasked with interpretation of the open records and meetings laws.
The attorney general's open records staff — and, of course, the public — owe a great deal to Carl Miller.
He was the assistant attorney general who interpreted the laws in the earliest days in a legal vacuum. No case law and no body of prior OAG opinions were available to guide him.
He ensured that his successors in the office of the attorney general had a strong body of legal authority rightly favoring openness and access on which to rely.
