[brief] PRELIMINARY STATEMENT  Government agencies need to be able to function.  While the public has a right to request and receive government records, that right is not without its limits, particularly to the extent it affects an agency’s ability to carry out its core mission.  For this reason, our courts have consistently recognized that requests under New Jersey’s Open Public Records Act (OPRA), N.J.S.A. 47:1A-1 to -13, must articulate with “reasonable clarity” the documents they are seeking by identifying a discrete and limited subject matter.  OPRA’s earliest case law establishes that requestors cannot avoid this obligation by simply requesting all of an agency’s records, or an agency’s entire file.  Thus, just as OPRA’s plain text places guardrails on requests to limit the outer boundaries of custodians’ obligations, including by allowing agencies to charge special service charges or deny requests as substantially disruptive, so too does this canon of well-developed case law define these parameters by permitting agencies to deny “overbroad” or “improper” requests.  The trial court’s decision in this case, which upholds the validity of Respondent [...]’s OPRA request for all emails sent or received by Appellant [...]’s Interim Provost, turns this well-settled law on its head.  This decision—if permitted to stand—will allow requestors to submit the very types of blanket requests that have been rejected again and again.  And while the trial court purported to rely on a through-line of cases beginning in 2012 with Burke v. Brandes, 429 N.J. Super. 167 (App. Div. 2012), and ending with the Supreme Court’s decision in Paff v. Galloway Township, 229 N.J. 340 (2017), its legal analysis was fundamentally flawed.  Not only did it misapprehend the scope of the Court’s decision in Paff v. Galloway Township, including the ultimate outcome of that appeal, it also plainly ignored the building blocks that led to Burke’s requirement that requests for records articulate a discrete and limited subject matter.  In short, by drawing a line where none exists, the trial court improperly expanded OPRA well beyond the bounds set by the Legislature and confirmed by the courts.  The effects of the trial court’s decision will be felt not just by the parties here, but by all government agencies responsible for responding to OPRA requests.  If required to field blanket requests seeking “all” of an employee’s emails that do not identify any subject matter, let alone a discrete and limited one, agencies will be regularly forced to redeploy personnel to review and redact tens of thousands of emails, without regard for the time, sensitivity, or expertise needed to determine what is privileged and what is not.  The consequences do not stop there.  While ostensibly limited to electronic inboxes or outboxes, there is no principled way of reconciling the decision in this case with well-settled precedent denying requests that seek “all” of an agency’s records, or an agency’s “entire file. ”  After all, a request seeking an employee’s inbox or outbox on a single day is hardly distinct from a request seeking that same employee’s entire “correspondence file,” or even their entire litigation or project file, even though such requests have been squarely foreclosed for nearly twenty years.  Last, and most importantly, allowing a requestor to engage in an unbridled search of an employee’s inbox and outbox, even if limited to a particular time period, will inevitably chill communication and grind agency operations to a halt.