Michael Mann testifying before Congress, with National Academy of Science Chair Ralph Cicerone (July 27, 2006)NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCESA punching bag of climate change skeptics, Michael Mann has seen his fair share of intrusion into his e-mails. In 2009, he was one of a number of scientists whose hacked messages were part of the “Climategate” scandal. But a judge in Virginia ruled last week (April 17) that Mann’s e-mails from his time as a professor at the University of Virginia cannot be obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
“This is a victory for science, public university faculty, and academic freedom,” Mann, who is now a professor at Penn State, said in a statement. The latest decision upheld a lower court’s ruling.
The American Tradition Institute (ATI), now called the Energy & Environment Legal Institute, had sued to obtain Mann’s emails from the University of Virginia (UVA). Justice Donald Lemons wrote in the court’s decision that handing over the e-mails would have put the school at a “competitive disadvantage,” thereby allowing it an exemption from FOIA. “In the context of the higher education research exclusion, competitive disadvantage implicates not only financial injury, but also harm to university-wide research efforts, damage to faculty recruitment and retention, undermining of faculty expectations of privacy and confidentiality, and ...
