Rosetti v. Ramapo-Indian Hills High School BOE

Amicus brief arguing that public officials’ personal email accounts discussing public business are required to be disclosed under OPRA.

Public officials used their private email accounts to discuss official public business and refused to turn over the contents of the emails in response to Open Public Records Act (OPRA) request arguing that the email logs are not government records and may be burdensome to disclose. The amicus brief filed by ACLU-NJ and Pashman Stein argues that these email logs are indeed government records despite being stored in non-government-owned servers. In addition, the district’s argument that the logs are difficult to produce does not meet the “significant disruption” standard explicitly stated in OPRA. As such, the brief argues that the email logs must be turned over, as they are subject to OPRA and do not fall within any exceptions.