From the Kba Media-bar Committee

• Jurisdiction: Kansas,United States
• Pages: 16
• Citation: Vol. 92 No. 2 Pg. 16
• Publication year: 2023

From the KBA media-bar committee No. 92 J. Kan. Bar Assn 2, 16 (2023) Kansas Bar Journal April, 2023

March, 2023

Kansas Supreme Court Charts New Course for Interpreting State's Open Records Law

By Max Kautsch, KBA Media-Bar Committee

Kansas City Star reporter John Shorman celebrated the Kansas Supreme Court's Jan. 6 opinion in Roe v. Phillips County Hospital by posting a picture of himself lugging four large boxes of paper on a utility cart along with a sarcastic message, writing "Remembering this great time in early 2019, when Kansas Department of Revenue printed off thousands of pages of emails in response to a years-long KORA."

But the days of paying for paper copies and manually reviewing documents are over, thanks to the Court's clarifying the Kansas Open Records Act requires disclosure of electronic records in their native format.

The Court applied the rule of in pari materia to KORA for the first time when it held that, "the plain language of the relevant statutes, when read together .. obliges the agency," receiving a request for records "to faithfully duplicate the public record in all its respects," when providing copies to a requester.^[1]

Not only did the Court rely on KORA's plain language to compel disclosure of electronic records upon request, but it also held there was no need "to apply its canons of statutory construction or consult legislative history" when "KORA's statutory mandates are plainly stated for our purposes here."^[2]

This ruling sets the precedent that KORA does not have to be an opaque, ambiguous mess. Rather, a reasonable interpretation of the words in the existing law, read together, is sufficient to effectuate the Legislature's intent to make government records available to the public.

In Roe, the Court considered whether a public agency was required to disclose computer files, specifically certain Microsoft Excel...