2021 is shaping up to be a year of major developments in OPRA law, with the Supreme Court reviewing three OPRA cases.

A few weeks ago, the Supreme Court decided to resolve the long unsettled issue of whether home addresses must be disclosed under OPRA, and it will most likely soon be reviewing the validity of the Attorney General’s requirement that the names of disciplined police officers be made public.

And last week, the Court granted review in another OPRA matter, Simmons v. Mercado. The Court’s website states that the question in the case is whether “complaints and summonses in the State’s Electronic Complaint Disposition Record (ECDR) system [are] subject to production under the Open Public Records Act?”

This bland statement doesn’t reflect the real importance and broad scope of this matter. As I discussed in this post, the case deals, for the first time, with an OPRA issue that affects all agencies: is an agency that has access to another agency’s database, but is not the custodian of that system, required to answer OPRA requests for information in that database?