The Information Management Implications of Public Citizen v. Carlin.

• Author: MONTANA, JOHN C.

In 1999, at 184 F.3d 900, the United States Circuit Court for the District of Columbia rendered its opinion in Public Citizen v. Carlin. The opinion reversed the trial court and ruled that retention of a paper printout of an e-mail, as opposed to retention of the electronic record itself, constituted compliance with the Federal Records Act. On its face, Public Citizen v. Carlin is not about records retention -- particularly not for workers outside the narrow sphere of the U.S. federal government. Rather, it is about management of government e-mail records and the value of metadata. It represents the latest in a line of cases ratifying reasonable conduct in implementing retention decisions. Because of this, its implications extend far beyond the question of e-mail and metadata.

Misconceptions About Case Law

Case law is a bit counterintuitive to most people, who have little familiarity with the decisions or with the legal processes by which they are first reached, then later used as precedent is subsequent cases. The layperson makes a number of assumptions about case law which are not so.

Misconception 1: Factual Precision

The first of these is factual precision. For example, laypersons concerned with imaging system legalities will often hope to locate a case decision on legality of magneto-optical imaging systems used by power utilities in the State of New York to image personnel files. Unfortunately, however, they search in vain, not because of poor search techniques, but because a case decided on these precise facts almost certainly does not exist. The underlying reality is that the potential number of fact situations in the real world makes it highly unlikely that one exactly like the one now faced has made it to court, been decided, and been published. Very rarely, it does actually happen (such a case is said in legal jargon to square "on all four corners" with your case), and when it does, and the outcome agrees with your position, such a case is valuable indeed.

Most of the time, however, lawyers and others interested in case law must make do with cases involving less than ideal facts -- different jurisdiction, industry, kinds of records, cause of action, theory of liability, and so on. Fortunately, this is not the impediment that it appears to be because of a second misconception about case law involving the precision of the legal doctrine arising out of a decided case.

Misconception 2: Doctrinal Precision

Anyone who has studied the U.S. tax code or the Environmental Protection Agency's air quality regulations for even a few minutes readily observes that these laws are concerned with minute, precise regulation of the matters they address. It is tempting to assume that other law is equally precise and regulates in similarly detailed fashion.

For case law, this is generally not true. A rule of law arising out of a case decision is likely to be broad in scope and, to the untrained reader, a bit vague. This vagueness is often difficult for trained readers as well -- lawyers often puzzle for hours over case decisions whose import or application are not at all clear, trying to discern their actual meaning. The U.S. Supreme Court is famous for issuing such decisions.

In theory, this broadness decides the case facing the court and simultaneously...