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."

Comments

Re:Why do these people always have something to hi

[cryptolemur]

That was his point, don't you think?
Wasting 30 seconds searching would have given you http://simplex.giss.nasa.gov/s..., or http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/model... or http://www.mi.uni-hamburg.de/S... ... and many, many more.

Funny thing, the code, the data, the explanations, everything has been avalable for years, and yet so many of the public believe they're not. I wonder why that is?

It's like there was this massive political campaign against science. Of which you just became part of. Congratulations!