After moving from Case Western Reserve University to William & Mary, a law professor discovered a practical consequence of public employment: his school email and files are now subject to state open-records laws. Since arriving in Virginia, he has been the target of two freedom-of-information requests.
Both requests focused on communications with environmental organizations and people involved in climate litigation, apparently because he has been critical of efforts to derail state-law lawsuits against fossil fuel companies, including Suncor Energy v. Boulder County. The first request sought correspondence with the Environmental Law Institute's Climate Judiciary Project; the second was broader, covering the Sabin Center and various environmental groups and foundations.
The professor says the requesters are unlikely to find anything worthwhile. His review work for the Climate Judiciary Project occurred before he joined William & Mary, and his broader research on federalism and environmental law spans more than twenty years. The amicus brief he filed in Suncor was not coordinated with plaintiffs' lawyers or funded by progressive foundations; it reflected his long-planned interest in the case.
He notes that the only financial support he received for related work came from a roundtable sponsored by the Law & Economics Center at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School, not from any source named in the FOI requests. He adds that he would have happily explained all of this in a quick call, which would have been cheaper than an FOI request.