This brochure first discusses the make-up of the Committee on Open Government and its responsibility for overseeing the implementation of two laws: the Freedom of Information Law (Public Officers Law, sections 84-90), which governs rights of access to government records; and the Open Meetings Law (Public Officers Law, sections 100-111), which…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 11 titles deal with the following topics: (1) the Supreme Court and the limits of the First Amendment in "Zurcher v. Stanford Daily"; (2) the radical journalist, I. F. Stone; (3) group owned vs. independentl owned…

Noting that there are more than 900 advisory committees providing private-sector advice to federal decision makers, this report investigates how well these committees have complied with the 1972 Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), which was intended to make them more accessible to the public and reporters. Following an overview of the subject,…

A study examined the freedom of the high school press in North Carolina to determine whether publication guidelines should be in place, and if so, what those guidelines should contain. High school newspaper advisors, high school principals, and high school newspaper editors from large and small, urban and rural, eastern and western high schools…

Thirteen issues of the National Education Association (NEA) newsletter highlight the following: (1) Bork, Supreme Court nomination and NEA affiliate win on pay bias suit; (2) NEA presidential endorsements; (3) TIAA-CREF (Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association and College Retirement Equities Fund) response to critics held inadequate; (4) NEA…

To examine how the Hazelwood decision (Hazelwood School District versus Kuhlmeier) affected high school advisers' views of their role in controlling content in their school newspapers and what they see as objectionable content, a study surveyed 100 Missouri high school advisers randomly selected from a list of 573 Missouri public high schools…

As new technologies find new markets, the telecommunications field must deal with definitional problems and with challenges to existing regulation. This paper looks at the fields of cable television and telecomputing, and approaches to their regulation, in order to shed light on the question of telephone companies' (telcos) potential involvement…

The ultimate test of the speech-action dichotomy, as it relates to symbolic speech to be considered by the courts, may be the fasting of prison inmates who use hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their confinement or to make political statements. While hunger strikes have been utilized by prisoners for years as a means of protest, it was…

Academic freedom, collegiality, and tenure are addressed with focus on how collective bargaining affects them. This material is intended to give college and university attorneys a feel for the challenges and problems that collective bargaining has brought to academia. Three sections look at the following: (1) academic freedom (what it is, academic…

University autonomy is a concept widely discussed and often misunderstood. In the Latin American context, university autonomy has been regarded as something inherent to the nature of the universities. As long as universities exist, the phenomenon of university autonomy will be present . University autonomy should be examined in the light of such…

Journalists and other investigators are daily using declassified government documents to shed light on historical and current events, but few have discovered how to tap the wealth of documents once classified but now in the public realm. An executive order from President Reagan eliminating declassification procedures and allowing released…

In the case of "Pico v. Island Trees Union Free School District," involving school library censorship by a Long Island (New York) board, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1982 failed to decide whether board discretion or First Amendment rights should prevail, and instead remanded the case to lower courts. The author of this document first…

Based on data compiled from issues of the American Library Association's Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, this paper analyzes over 500 censorship cases occurring in U.S. educational institutions and public libraries from 1976 through 1980, and makes a comparison with a previous study of U.S. censorship covering 1966 to 1975. Information is…

This booklet accompanies the New York State Library exhibit of material related to the trial of John Peter Zenger. This 1735 trial established the legal precedent giving juries the power to decide libel suits. Labeled "the germ of American freedom," the trial was an important step in the development of American concepts of free speech…

Prepared by members of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Committee of the Associated Press Managing Editors (AMPE), this collection of articles deals with a variety of issues concerning freedom of the press. Following a list of members of the committee, the major articles in the collection are: (1) "Massive Libel Suits Threaten Freedom of All…