The Bill of Rights enshrines the rights to free speech and free press in our Constitution. Yet since the beginning of our republic, various compartments of our government have tried (and always failed) to impose prior restraint on those rights by invoking court power...
With apologies to my academic friends: it is sometimes said that arguments in academia are especially vehement because the stakes are so low. However, from the perspective of Florida community college professor Isabel Del Pino-Allen, the stakes in her defamation...
On December 1, 2014, Travel Weekly published a glowing article about former Norwegian Cruise Line CEO Colin Veitch, calling him a “visionary” and maybe “the most influential and creative cruise CEO of the past decade”. Veitch’s successor as CEO, Kevin Sheehan, took...
If you do business with the state of Florida, you may no longer be able to rely on a trade secrets exemption to hide related contracts or financial data from the public. Currently, certain public records can be kept private if they contain trade secrets. In 2016, the...
Florida is well-known throughout the country for its Sunshine Law, which is intended to ensure public access without unreasonable delay to public records received or created by our government. A recent Florida case looked at whether having to drive 50 miles was an...
Open government is the best government, and we are fortunate that Florida has some of the strongest open records laws and policies in the country. Though not perfect, they do a good job of promoting a more transparent and accountable government. One such policy began...
On January 31, 2018, Marks Gray news media and First Amendment attorney Edward Birk was interviewed outside the Duval County courthouse by New4Jax. Birk represents Graham Media Group/News4Jax in a dispute about what evidence will be made public in the high-profile...
Down at the crossroads where innovative private enterprise meets good accountable government, there can be collisions between public records and trade secrets. Under Florida’s strong public records laws, which protects the commercially valuable secrets of those who do...