VA Supreme Court: Michael Mann Needn't Turn Over All His Email

RoccamOccam sends news that the Virginia Supreme Court has ruled that Michael Mann, a climate scientist notable for his work on the "hockey stick" graph, does not have to turn over the entirety of his papers and emails under Freedom of Information laws. Roughly 1,000 documents were turned over in response to the request, but another 12,000 remain, which lawyers for the University of Virginia say are "of a proprietary nature," and thus entitled to an exemption. The VA Supreme Court ruled (PDF), "the higher education research exemption's desired effect is to avoid competitive harm not limited to financial matters," and said the application of "proprietary" was correct in this case. Mann said he hopes the ruling "can serve as a precedent in other states confronting this same assault on public universities and their faculty."

Re:So what?

[Spazmania]

So why hasn't Steyn demanded the data under ordinary discovery rules? FOIA is an odd way to go about getting data you're supposedly entitled to in order to defend yourself in court.

Re:Why do these people always have something to hi

[Anonymous Coward]

I have nothing to hide in my data, most of which is in publicly accessible databases, except for some that was assumed to not be worth the time and effort to reformat. That said, a request for emails would be beyond annoying, not because of what it might show, but because of the effort it would take to separate things, the majority of which would be useless (meeting times) and making sure to exclude things legally required to when probably neither party of the communication actually cares. I could pull out most important emails with a few key search terms (e.g. emails about a specific paper, or piece of equipment, or data campaign), but sorting through the other thousands of emails would be a huge time sink. I would have a vested interest in not sharing that even if I didn't have anything to hide and didn't even care if people saw my personal emails.