Much legal literature discusses the federal Freedom of Information Act. Most of it ranges in tone from concerned to hopeless; none more so than the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s 2016 report on the law, succinctly titled “FOIA Is Broken: A Report.”

Some work, too, looks at various state sunshine laws—Texas, Illinois, South Carolina, Florida. But surprisingly few scholars have taken a swing at the informational transparency landscape of the nation’s most populous state—few legal scholars, at least. This is especially notable because California’s public records law has a particular provision, known colloquially as the “catch-all exemption,” that doesn’t appear in FOIA and has a significant impact on how many records requests play out. The exemption deserves a deeper examination. 

This Note will attempt to undertake one. First, it will briefly touch on the history and purpose of both the California Public Records Act and FOIA, the state law’s predecessor and inspiration. It will then compare the two laws with the aim of examining the roots of California’s catch-all exemption, explaining why such an exemption was explicitly written out of the federal law (with unclear success). Finally, it will look to California agencies’ misuse of the catch-all exemption and several of its fellow highly discretionary exceptions, and it will discuss how the exemptions’ ambiguity and the law’s overall lack of enforcement mechanisms result in a system by which government records custodians, in direct contravention of the spirit of CPRA, regularly deny records requests for unjustifiable reasons such as inconvenience or self-protection.

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