2019 2019: Peltz-Steele Joins Inaugural Editorial Board of New Journal

2019 2019: Peltz-Steele Joins Inaugural Editorial Board of New Journal
Peltz-Steele Joins Inaugural Editorial Board of New Journal

The Brechner Center for Freedom of Information at the University of Florida has launched a new research journal, The Journal of Civic Information, and UMass Law’s Professor Rick Peltz-Steele is serving on the inaugural editorial board.

 

The Brechner Center for Freedom of Information at the University of Florida has launched a new research journal, The Journal of Civic Information, and UMass Law’s Professor Rick Peltz-Steele is serving on the inaugural editorial board.

Including legal analysis and social science, the peer-reviewed quarterly is inviting scholarship in the field of access to public information, especially works that “provide insights of practical value for those who work day-to-day in access to government information.” Launched this month, volume 1, number 1 includes articles on the privatization of public records and access to government officials through social media.

Professor Peltz-Steele joins an editorial board comprising access-to-information scholars from across the United States, from Georgetown to Reno. Peltz-Steele has been a researcher and writer in freedom of information law for more than a decade, having published a casebook in the area in 2012. Freedom of information was something an impetus for Peltz-Steele’s application to law school in the 1990’s, he said, after, as a student journalist, he butted heads with police over access to public records. Peltz-Steele’s most recent work in freedom of information, called “access to information” elsewhere in the world, has been comparative, examining emerging doctrines in Africa relative to access law in the United States and in India.

Publisher of the new journal, the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information at the University of Florida is an incubator for initiatives that give the public timely and affordable access to the information necessary for informed, participatory citizenship. The Center is a source of research, expertise and advocacy about the law of gathering and disseminating news across all platforms and technologies.