Last month's column dealt with the philosophy behind open meetings laws and why public officials should conduct the public's business in public, not in private. Open meetings laws like the federal ...

Neil Derry pulled his Sunshine Ordinance off the agenda for last week’s San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors meeting. The measure, which Derry first introduced in March, is intended to make ...

For more than 30 years, Stanford political scientist James Fishkin has been exploring and demonstrating the capacity of small, representative "mini-publics" to make thoughtful meaningful political ...

That’s pretty much what a district court judge told the Reno Gazette-Journal when he turned down the newspaper’s public records request for Gov. Jim Gibbons’ e-mails. Judge James Russell said only six ...

Last week, in Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s first signed opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court expanded the deliberative process privilege under exception 5 of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), limiting ...

In a decision issued December 21, 2015 (Caldecott v. Superior Court of Orange County (Newport- Mesa Unified School District)), the California Court of Appeal ruled that a former school district ...

A privilege that protects the candid exchange of opinion among government decisionmakers is limited and must be examined on a case-by-case basis, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled Aug. 15. Aug. 19, 2003 ...

An article in the Monroe News-Star last May about a controversial faith-based school getting approved for hundreds of taxpayer-financed vouchers has ignited a legal conflagration over Louisiana's ...