Fixing judge’s email fail

The Nevada Supreme Court won’t issue a clearer decision than the public records ruling it handed down Friday. Whether District Judge Doug Smith is competent enough to follow the court’s direction is another matter entirely.

In the easiest case the high court will ever get, a threejustice panel ruled unanimously that the email addresses of Clark County School District teachers are public records. The school district had refused to provide the email addresses to the Nevada Policy Research Institute, which requested them as part of its annual campaign to educate teachers about their limited summer window to withdraw from their union.

The school district didn’t like the reason the think tank wanted the email addresses, so the system denied NPRI’s request. Governments are not allowed to respond to records requests based on what they think the records will be used for and whether they agree with that purpose. If records are declared public under the law, they must be released. If they’re declared confidential under the law, they cannot be released.

Teacher email addresses, which are funded by tax dollars, are clearly public information. Thousands of them are made available on school websites; that wouldn’t happen if they were confidential under the law.

NPRI sued to obtain the records, but Judge Smith, like the school district, ignored the plain language of Nevada’s public records law because he also didn’t like the reason NPRI wanted the email addresses. So he issued an embarrassingly bad decision based on an intentional misreading of the law. He said a statute that keeps confidential the email addresses and telephone numbers of individuals who provide them to a government entity applies to public employees, whose email addresses are provided to them by the taxpaying public.

In an interview with the Review-Journal’s editorial board last year, Judge Smith admitted ignoring the law in making his decision. “That’s why we have appellate courts,” he said. “Sometimes you have to make equitable decisions, decisions based on equity, not what the law says.” In reality, people like Judge Smith are the reason we have appellate courts — he’s had nearly two dozen rulings overturned by the Supreme Court over the past four-plus years.

The Supreme Court decision returns the case to Judge Smith. This case has wasted vast amounts of school resources and court time already. For once, Judge Smith should follow the law and order the school district to release its teacher email directory to NPRI. Public records belong to the taxpaying public, not secretive bureaucrats.