CJ Griffin Quoted in Editorial Suggesting Government Transparency Must Not be Another Victim of the COVID-19 Outbreak
CJ Griffin, Director of the Justice Gary S. Stein Public Interest Center at Pashman Stein Walder Hayden, was quoted in an Opinion of the Star Ledger Editorial Board, “This week in shady governance: Murphy & OPRA | Editorial." Addressing reliance on the Emergency Powers Act to deny public records requests, as well as recent amendments to New Jersey’s OPRA law, the Opinion suggests that government transparency must not be another victim of the COVID-19 outbreak.
As OPRA expert CJ Griffin, a partner at Pashman Stein in Hackensack, explains: “The law is written in a way that allows agencies to say that anything relating to Covid 19 is covered. And clearly, that’s not what the legislation intended. They intended it to include specific things — medical records, for instance — but not just any document that contains the word ‘Covid.’”
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