08/14/2026
This week, Salvatore Prescott Porter & Porter successfully defended University of Michigan Law Professor Rachel Rothschild against an effort to convert her private correspondence into public property. This work was joint with the University of Michigan and the inimitable team at the Climate Science Defense Fund.
Professor Rothschild is a scholar of environmental law and legal history whose research on state climate superfund statutes has informed legislation in several states. That is why she has been targeted. The requester was Government Accountability & Oversight, a nonprofit that received $300,000 from Murray Energy — disclosed in the coal company's 2019 bankruptcy filings — and whose board includes Christopher Horner, who has publicly asserted that global temperatures were not rising. GAO has ceaselessly hounded climate and energy researchers, state officials, and public university faculty, trying to access their personal projects.
We are not neutral about their tool, Michigan's Freedom of Information Act. Our firm uses it constantly, against state agencies and public institutions, on behalf of vulnerable clients, in support of voting rights and more. It is one of the most important tools an individual has against an institution.
..Which is exactly why it matters what it covers. FOIA reaches the work of public bodies. It is not a subpoena power handed to whoever dislikes a professor's conclusions or a scientist's findings. The Court's ruling drew that line where the statute draws it: between records created in the performance of an official function and correspondence that was never the public body's business at all.
That distinction protects every researcher at every public institution in Michigan — including, and this is the point, the ones whose conclusions we would disagree with.
A conservative group is suing for emails of a law professor who helped create legislation to force oil, gas and coal companies to pay for climate damage.
