In 1989, the United States Supreme Court formulated the central purposes doctrine of the
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by ruling that the law was designed to grant citizens a right
of access to records reflecting on the activities of government officials. This decision immediately
generated controversy. The majority of parties interested in FOIA jurisprudence claimed that the
judgement misconstrued the congressional intent by denying that legislators had hoped to create a
right of access to all government-held information, regardless of its content. The contrast between
the Court's doctrine and the majority interpretation, or the free-flow-of-information view, is the
main topic of this thesis.
In exploring this matter, it becomes evident that the intellectual history of access
legislation in the United States is marked by considerable diversity: from the 1920s through to the
present era, various FOIA constituencies have espoused distinctive views on how an access-torecords
statute should be understood. Most of these interpretations have focussed on the need for
access as a measure to help citizens oversee the conduct of government personnel, and only the
free-flow supporters have broken from this pattern. The philosophy they offer in its place
suggests that oversight interpretations, particularly the central purposes doctrine, are illegitimate.
These orthodox commentators argue instead that because the FOIA was designed to serve the
same goals as the First Amendment, it must be read as mandating disclosure as "an end for its
own sake."
The principal contention here is that free-flow supporters have dismissed the
government-oversight views far too quickly. To illustrate this point, the thesis focuses on the
central purposes doctrine, and articulates it in the form of an "accountability view" to establish
that the Court's decision was not as arbitrary as is often claimed. Second, the argument inquires
whether one of these two predominant views can be said to have a stronger rationale than the
other. The ultimate conclusion of this line of inquiry is that, because of serious logical flaws in
the first-amendment argument supporting the free-flow theory, the central purposes doctrine
actually represents the more reasonable interpretation of the statutory purpose of the act. / Arts, Faculty of / Library, Archival and Information Studies (SLAIS), School of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/12140 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | McAndrew, Ian |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Format | 9215463 bytes, application/pdf |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
Page generated in 0.0022 seconds