Court: Scientist’s Emails Are Private
Judges rule that climate scientist Michael Mann’s communications are not subject to Freedom of Information Act requests.
A punching bag of climate change skeptics, Michael Mann has seen his fair share of intrusion into his e-mails. In 2009, he was one of a number of scientists whose hacked messages were part of the “Climategate” scandal. But a judge in Virginia ruled last week (April 17) that Mann’s e-mails from his time as a professor at the University of Virginia cannot be obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
“This is a victory for science, public university faculty, and academic freedom,” Mann, who is now a professor at Penn State, said in a statement. The latest decision upheld a lower court’s ruling.
The American Tradition Institute (ATI), now called the Energy & Environment Legal Institute, had sued to obtain Mann’s emails from the University of Virginia (UVA). Justice Donald Lemons wrote in the court’s decision that handing over the e-mails would have put the school at a “competitive disadvantage,” thereby allowing it an exemption from FOIA. “In the context of the higher education research exclusion, competitive disadvantage implicates not only financial injury, but also harm to university-wide research efforts, damage to faculty recruitment and retention, undermining of faculty expectations of privacy and confidentiality, and impairment of free thought and expression,” he wrote.
http://www.the-scientist.com//?articles.view/articleNo/39772/title/Court--Scientist-s-Emails-Are-Private/
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