The Iowa Supreme Court typically opens its rulings on the state’s public-records and open-meetings laws by reciting that the cases start with a “presumption of openness.”
But a new study of the court’s open-government decisions finds the presumption now wins only about half the time. That is a marked change from a decade ago, when the court’s decisions leaned decidedly toward public access and disclosure.
The Iowa Freedom of Information Council study examined 21 decisions involving Iowa Code chapters 21, 22 and 23 — the open-meetings, public-records and Iowa Public Information Board laws — that were decided between February 2011 and June 2026. The study examined how each of the 12 justices who sat on those cases voted.
The study was based on a review and analysis made with the assistance of generative artificial intelligence. Michael Giudicessi, legal counsel for the group, and I completed the review and editing that produced the new report.
The study’s central finding is a quiet flattening.
In the 2011-2018 era of the late Chief Justice Mark Cady, the mean direction of the court’s open-government holdings was +0.43 on a scale where +1 means every ruling favored access.
For the current court under Chief Justice Susan Christensen since 2021, that figure has fallen to 0.00 — with five rulings favoring access interests, five for confidentiality outcomes, and one neutral outcome across 11 decisions.
“The doctrine hasn’t changed; the arithmetic has,” the study concludes.
The court still recites the openness presumption, but the statutory exemptions, in the report’s words, “have grown teeth” — shielding driver-license data in one case, job-applicant privacy in another, and a closed-session hiring interview in a third.
The shift the Iowa FOI Council found is generational rather than institutional.
Three of the newest justices — Christopher McDonald, Dana Oxley and David May — are the only members of the court with net records favoring confidentiality. They vote together most often. McDonald and May agreed in 100 percent of the open-government cases they both heard.
What has kept the court’s overall results near the center, the study found, is a wing of holdover justices, Edward Mansfield and Thomas Waterman, joined by Christensen and newcomer Matthew McDermott. Together, they supply the votes that decide the closest cases.
One popular assumption did not survive the data, the study found.
Some court-watchers have speculated McDonald and McDermott, both alumni of the Des Moines law firm Belin McCormick, would vote as a pair and perhaps be guided by Mansfield, the third former Belin lawyer now on the court.
Some even went so far to speculate that those three might carry the torch favoring access that was lit by Mark McCormick, a named partner in their old firm, who was a former Iowa Supreme Court justice. In 1979, McCormick wrote one of the most progressive pro-access, pro-media rulings in the Howard v. Des Moines Register & Tribune Co. case.
The decision involved a woman’s invasion-of-privacy action over the publication of her identity as part of an investigative report on involuntary sterilizations at the Jasper County Home. The newspaper asserted, and the court agreed, that the issue was one of substantial public interest and the private facts about her were in public records provided by the governor’s office.
Contrary to the speculation, or hope, McDonald and McDermott agreed just 78 percent of the time in the access cases reviewed — the lowest of McDonald’s pairings with other court members.
The directional turn for the court in part traces to the 2012 decision in ACLU Foundation of Iowa v. Atlantic Community School District, a case centered on whether the public was entitled to disciplinary information about two school employees who conducted a controversial strip-search of five female students.
The Supreme Court decided confidentiality for the employees’ personnel files outweighed the public’s interest in accountability.
The decision was authored by David Wiggins, a Democratic appointee and former plaintiff’s lawyer. Waterman and Mansfield dissented in the Atlantic case, coming out for an access-friendly standard of review that did not prevail.
That change abandoned the practice of construing an exception to access and openness narrowly, at least when the language of a confidentiality exemption in the statutes is unambiguous. The decision led Cady to lament that the majority “takes a step backward from the new age of open government in this state.”
He was right. But it is unlikely he could have predicted the modification in approach started by Wiggins would gain disciples in McDonald, Oxley and May once they joined the court half a decade later.
Across the full 2011-2026 review period, the scoring range favoring access shows Wiggins, despite his 2012 Atlantic school ruling, and Brent Appel, each at net +6 on the access side, with McDonald and May at the opposite end of the range, at net −3.
Appel, writing for the court in 2012, put the traditional rule plainly: “Freedom of information acts establish a liberal policy in favor of access to public records.” Wiggins, dissenting in a 2020 driver-privacy case, would have ordered the records disclosed.
For those seeking to vindicate access rights, the study suggests that openness outcomes remain attainable even though the current court seems more forgiving of government defendants and confidentiality proponents.
The justices who most often side with access tend to enforce the openness presumption and narrow application standard through the statute’s text — and enforce a clearly written exemption just as faithfully.
Nevertheless, recent access victories have turned on precise statutory readings: that confidentiality for a closed police investigation is not permanent, that unexplained delay in producing records is itself a denial, and that records from job applicants inside government are not shielded from public access.
The Iowa FOI Council, a nonpartisan group that advocates for open government in Iowa, said the votes in the study were confirmed against the text of each Supreme Court opinion. Quotations in the study carry a citation to the official court reporter.
The study cautioned that 21 decisions over 15 years is too small for making definitive correlations. The study further noted that its coding measures only the direction of a holding — whether it favored or resulted in access or confidentiality — and does not judge why the justices voted as they did.
An appendix with the study sets out the full vote breakout for all 21 decisions — the direction of each holding and how every participating justice voted, case by case. So, any figure in the study can be traced back to the official court opinions.
The full study is available at https://tinyurl.com/2hzx47av.
* * *
Randy Evans can be reached at DMRevans2810@gmail.com
