Last month, when the Commonwealth Court issued its first published opinion addressing Pennsylvania’s new Right-to-Know Law, it shone a bright light on a long-standing issue: the inherent tension between the public’s right to access government records and a person’s interest in the privacy of information that the government possesses about him. Pennsylvania courts wrestled with this issue for many years under the old Right-to-Know Law, and, despite the passage of the new law last year, it seems the issue will continue to vex the courts. Indeed, the Commonwealth Court’s recent opinion, Pennsylvania State Education Association v. Commonwealth , further muddles the privacy question and, unless corrected, stands to cause an array of additional problems.

The PSEA case centers on whether the Right-to-Know Law prohibits the disclosure of public school employees’ home addresses. Under the new law, the home addresses of law enforcement officers and judges are expressly exempt from disclosure. The law is silent with respect to other public employees’ addresses and, thus, they are presumed to be publicly accessible unless subject to one of the law’s many exemptions. Consistent with the text of the law, the Office of Open Records has issued a series of decisions holding that government agencies could not deny requests for records containing employees’ addresses.

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