The Philadelphia Inquirer reports:
Since the beginning of the year, a new Pennsylvania law on public records has been sending tremors through state and local governments.
Unprecedented numbers of citizens, civic groups, reporters and businesses have filed thousands of requests for government documents and data.
Now come the aftershocks: Dozens of public-record lawsuits are piling up in courthouses around the state, waiting for judges to spit out rulings on what the law really means.
…
The new law is more detailed than the old one in specifying which government records are open to the public and which are not.
It also created the [Office of Open Records], a state agency to act as a first-stage arbiter when there’s a dispute over a record being public or not.
In just eight months, the OOR has handled more than 4,500 e-mails and phone inquiries, about evenly split between people wanting to get information and government agencies wondering if they have to provide it.
…
The new law could be a victim of its own success.
As of yesterday, 55 rulings from the OOR have been appealed to local or state courts, where county and appellate judges will ultimately decide which government records the public is entitled to see.
There’s a serious risk that when the cases are argued, John Q. Public will be legally outgunned by local and state agencies, using taxpayer money to pay thousands of dollars in legal fees – and arguing, usually, that taxpayers have no legal right to see the records they’re asking for.
The problem of excessively defensive litigation is typically mitigated by awarding the plaintiff attorney’s fees if they prevail, as is done in civil rights and discrimination cases.
Unfortunately, the Pennsylvania Right To Know Law’s attorney’s fees provision is not nearly as strong as the federal freedom of information act. The Pennsylvania law only permits attorneys fees to be shifted where:
Section 1304. Court costs and attorney fees.
(a) Reversal of agency determination. — If a court reverses the final determination of the appeals officer or grants access to a record after a request for access was deemed denied, the court may award reasonable attorney fees and costs of litigation or an appropriate portion thereof to a requester if the court finds either of the following:
(1) the agency receiving the original request willfully or with wanton disregard deprived the requester of access to a public record subject to access or otherwise acted in bad faith under the provisions of this act; or
(2) the exemptions, exclusions or defenses asserted by the agency in its final determination were not based on a reasonable interpretation of law.
(b) Sanctions for frivolous requests or appeals. — The court may award reasonable attorney fees and costs of litigation or an appropriate portion thereof to an agency or the requester if the court finds that the legal challenge under this chapter was frivolous.
That’s a hard standard to meet, as shown by cases in other states with similar "willful" language, and thus it makes the Right-To-Know Law essentially unavailable except to lawyers and well-heeled parties.
Compare that weak fee-shifting to the Federal Freedom of Information Act’s more robust fee-shifting:
The Freedom of Information Act provides that the court "may assess against the United States reasonable attorney fees and other litigation costs reasonably incurred in any case . . . in which the complainant has substantially prevailed." 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(4)(E).
Given low rates typically awarded to prevailing plaintiffs, FOIA litigation is by no means profitable, but the fee-shifting takes enough of bite out of the costs plaintiffs must incur when fighting against the unlimited resources of the government to attract the attention of public interest organizations, non-profits, and media companies. Which is good for democracy, and strikes a respectable balance between the need to know and the preservation of taxpayer funds: only the strongest cases get picked up by those organizations and carried through to their conclusion.
But that’s only on the Federal level. In Pennsylvania, however, if you want to know what your state or local governments are up to, you need to be willing to pony up five-or-six figure attorneys’ fees just to dispute their objections, much less prevail over them through litigation and appeals. Though it’s your government, you have to put your money where their mouth is.
Of course, it bears repeating that, when the government hires lawyers by the hour, the relationship creates an inherent conflict of interest in which the lawyers have an incentive to excessively defend, delay and deny to generate more billable hours, exacerbating the problem and raising even more barriers to citizen-led investigations of the government.
Thus, much like how taxpayers are better served when the government is represented on a contingent fee for its own lawsuits, I propose the government only be defended on a contingent fee, too: if the defense lawyers don’t "substantially prevail," they don’t get paid at all.