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My phone blew up with phone calls and text messages last week.
Journalists, friends, attorneys and others in the business community all had the same question: What is Arkansas Business up to and why would a sitting Arkansas Supreme Court justice file a lawsuit over it?
Right now, I can only answer part of that, but first, some background.
Recently, Senior Editor Mark Friedman filed public records requests with the Administrative Office of the Courts and the court’s Office of Professional Conduct seeking the correspondence of former OPC Executive Director Lisa Ballard and several others, including most notably Supreme Court Justice Courtney Rae Hudson.
When it came time to fulfill the request, there was disagreement among the seven members of the Supreme Court about whether Hudson’s emails with Ballard should be released to us, with five members apparently voting in some private proceeding to make the records public.
Hudson disagreed strongly enough to file a lawsuit in Pulaski County Circuit Court, asking a judge to enter a preliminary injunction enjoining the AOC and OPC from releasing her emails. The lower court judge, Patricia James, quickly entered the requested injunction, and hopefully by the time this column is published, she will also have allowed Arkansas Business to intervene in the case and appeal the ruling.
I won’t wade too far into the legal weeds about why we believe these documents should be released (we have lawyers for that), but I will note that we aren’t trying to access any documents or material concerning cases before the Supreme Court.
No, we’re trying to understand what happened at the court’s Office of Professional Conduct, where the director and two staff attorneys abruptly resigned earlier this year.
The office remains without a permanent executive director, and there has been an information vacuum ever since Ballard’s and the other attorneys’ resignations.
We think what happens at the body charged with the discipline of attorneys and judges in Arkansas is important and of great public interest.
It isn’t the typical business story that our publication pursues, but with little reporting elsewhere on the circumstances surrounding the staff exodus and a proliferation of rumors, we decided it was worth investigating.
The rumors circulating in the legal community about the turnover at the OPC range from benign personality clashes to allegations of wrongdoing. We’re simply doing what any good journalist should — checking it out.
There may be nothing in these emails, as some close to Hudson have suggested, and this may be an extension of tension and the internal politics at the state’s highest court.
But we won’t know unless we see them, so we hope the courts will follow the spirit of the Supreme Court’s first landmark ruling on the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act in 1968.
It should be “liberally interpreted to the end that its praiseworthy purposes may be achieved.”
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