Wisconsin Attorney General Sides With Student Newspaper in Records Lawsuit

The attorney general of Wisconsin has sided with the student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, which is pursuing a lawsuit against the university to get access to the minutes, agendas, and recordings of the campus’s student-government meetings. In a nonbinding opinion reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the attorney general, J.B. Van Hollen, said that student governments and other such groups given powers of collective governance are subject to the state’s open-meetings and open-records laws. The student paper sued the university last month to get access to the records. The university has cited a federal student-privacy law in refusing to release the records.