Court Opinion

ID: 9794260
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 03:02:12.377842+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T08:13:31.304966
License: Public Domain

LINDE, J.,
dissenting.
I regret that the court lets the unusual and appealing facts of its first case under the “privacy exemption” from the Public Records Act lead it to give the exemption an erroneous and unworkable interpretation.
This is not a case at common law, where a court may choose to pick its way empirically from instance to instance while waiting for some principle to emerge. The Public Records Act, with its exemptions, is a statute. Its meaning in future circumstances likely will be fixed and must be considered in deciding the first case, unusual or not. Moreover, the act is not a statute to be applied by courts in a limited number of lawsuits but one to be administered by hundreds of state and local agencies with respect to millions of entries in documents of all kinds. This administrative character of the Public Records Act is essential to its correct interpretation. It contradicts an interpretation that needlessly exposes large categories of records to individual requests for exemptions for disclosure under disputable factual circumstances, as today’s decision does. I therefore dissent from this decision.
I.
The disputed provision, ORS 192.502(2), allows an agency to withhold what otherwise must be disclosed as a public record “if the public disclosure thereof would constitute an unreasonable invasion of privacy.” The Motor Vehicle Division’s (MVD’s) refusal to disclose the address of a licensed driver is not authorized by this exemption.
To fit within the exemption stated in ORS 192.502(2), the withheld information in a public record must meet four tests:
(1) It must be “information of a personal nature.”
(2) Public disclosure of the information must constitute an “invasion of privacy.”
*446(3) The invasion of privacy must be “unreasonable.”
(4) There must be no public interest that nevertheless requires disclosure in the particular instance.
This statute must be administered by all public agencies with respect to all public records not otherwise exempt from disclosure. It therefore is important to analyze generally how the exemption is to be administered before applying the statute to the facts in this case.
The statute calls for some categorical determinations and some determinations that an agency may leave to individual circumstances.
1. The first test describes a category of information. Whether information is “of a personal nature” does not depend on how either a particular person or an abstract “ordinary reasonable person” feels about the information. The scope of the category is to be sought in the legislation, not in individual or social facts.1 I agree with the majority that the Court of Appeals misconstrued this element. “Personal” information does not mean “confidential” or “private” information. The first element of the exemption is the same for all agencies if they keep records concerning individuals.
2. The second test is more debatable. It is whether the information is of such a nature that its public disclosure would constitute an invasion of privacy. I understand this to mean that the public disclosure must be (must “constitute,” not “facilitate”) an invasion of privacy, in the form of unwanted publicity.2 “Constitute,” in our statute, differs from “prevent” an unreasonable invasion of privacy, the verb used in the Washington statute quoted by the majority. But it can *447apply the term “public disclosure” to a requested disclosure to a single person for private use only by reading public disclosure as if it meant “disclosure to a member of the public” or perhaps “disclosure by a public official.” I would hold that the statute does not exempt information if its disclosure might be used by some individual to invade a person’s privacy.
Because, as I would hold, the exemption requires that public disclosure itself rather than use of the information must qualify as an invasion of privacy, this second test also describes categories of information rather than individual cases. Personal addresses as a category are unlike, for instance, one’s medical history, financial circumstances, religious views, or past marital or other liaisons. People routinely put their addresses on their checks, on outgoing letters, and in telephone directories; they give their addresses to banks, to insurance companies, and to many merchants to obtain credit or deliveries. The fact that some people choose not to do so does not put addresses into the class of information whose mere disclosure is an invasion of privacy. There is no basis to believe that the legislators who adopted the exemption placed addresses into that class. The present case should stop at this point.
3. The majority errs in lumping into a single question whether a public disclosure is an invasion of privacy and, if so, whether it is “unreasonable,” which is the third test of the exemption. If a public disclosure is not in the class of invasions of privacy, the agency’s inquiry stops there; but if the disclosure does invade a person’s privacy, it nevertheless may not be unreasonable. This third test is not a categorical determination. It likely will differ from case to case under varying circumstances and with different agency functions and purposes, subject to each agency’s general duty to follow a consistent practice. The individual nature of the determination appears from the provision of ORS 192.502(2) requiring the requesting person to prove that the effect on the privacy of its subject would not be unreasonable, always assuming that public disclosure would be an invasion of privacy at all.
Again, the administrative setting of the Public Records Act is crucial to understanding the exemption. The issue arises between an agency and someone asking for the information, not as an agency adjudication between the two or *448more persons concerned. Agencies must be able to determine whether they are allowed to withhold information, whether disclosure would be an unreasonable invasion of someone’s privacy, without any communication with the person concerned. Although the assent or objections of that person and the reasons for an objection would be significant, the person often will be unavailable, may have left for parts unknown, or may be dead; yet the agency must decide for itself whether the exemption applies.
4. The fourth test is reached only in the case of a request for disclosure that would be an unreasonable invasion of privacy but for an overriding public interest requiring disclosure “in the particular instance.” This exception to the privacy exemption by its own terms is to be administered case by case. Again, therefore, the assent or objections of the subject of the information is likely to be significant, but it is not decisive.
It must be kept in mind that the statute applies to many situations entirely different from the present case. To suggest just one example, information of a personal nature whose public disclosure clearly would be a potential invasion of privacy may be sought for the purposes of a biography of a person who is no longer alive, information which also may involve others still living. The publication of the information might be “unreasonable” if the person were alive, but obviously the subject of the biography can no longer be consulted; yet the agency must be able to determine both “reasonableness” and, if necessary, whether publication of the information nevertheless is in the public interest. Although a request to keep a particular fact confidential is relevant to the individualized third and fourth issues, it cannot have decisive weight in agency adminstration of the Public Records Act.
II.
In the present case, MVD and the Court of Appeals correctly held that the address of its licensee, present in MVD’s files by virtue of that person’s individual listing as a licensee, is “information of a personal nature.” We do not here deal with an agency’s attempt to withhold, for instance, otherwise non-exempt official correspondence on grounds that it *449incidentally includes someone’s address. When an agency routinely requires individuals to submit their addresses, telephone numbers, and the like for its files, this is a category of personal information for purposes of ORS 192.502(2). MVD, the Court of Appeals, and now the majority err at the second step, because addresses are not the kind of information whose public disclosure would be an “invasion of privacy” in the terms of the exemption.
Searching for some way to thwart the present plaintiff, the majority chooses to disregard the objective of an interpretation that can be systematically administered and holds that in this case disclosure of a licensee’s address would unreasonably invade her privacy. The entire explanation for the majority’s holding is found in these lines:
“The statutory tests for the exemption from inspection are met in the record and rulings of the circuit court in this case. The subject of the record, a residence address, is personal information, and the individual gave prior notice to MVD in writing of the reasons why disclosure would affect her privacy. Her affidavit filed in the trial court sufficiently established that disclosure to the requester would more likely than not unreasonably invade her privacy because providing the information would allow Jordan to harry her incessantly to the extent that an ordinary reasonable person would deem highly offensive. Both requirements for threshold entitlement to the exemption are thus established and MVD is justified in relying upon ORS 192.502(2) and refusing disclosure until a showing is made either involving a public interest or that the disclosure would not constitute an unreasonable invasion of privacy.” (Footnotes omitted.)
308 Or at 442-43. What rule, if any, does the majority opinion state? It seems to be this: An agency may deny an inquiry for a person’s address when that person has given the agency a plausible reason why disclosure to the specified inquirer would lead to an unreasonable invasion of privacy. Such a rule is as futile as it is unworkable.
First, what is an agency to do if the inquiry comes from someone other than the inquirer designated in the request to withhold the address? The Public Records Act does not'allow an agency to demand the reasons for someone’s request for a public record.
Second, does the Court expect an agency to take the *450reasons asserted for a request to withhold an address at face value, though the person may really be hiding from a creditor or from service of process rather than from someone pestering her for personal reasons or the like? If not, what is the agency’s practical obligation to verify the supposed threat of an “unreasonable invasion of privacy” if it expects to justify a refusal to disclose?
Third, one’s address may be sought from many other public agencies besides MVD. The typical adult’s address is found in many records, in county land records, election records, in an alumni office, in the public schools attended by the person’s children, often in the records of a public employer or a public library or the Department of Veterans Affairs, and so forth. An effort really to keep one’s address secret requires one either systematically to withdraw from all contact with public agencies or to persuade each separate agency that disclosure of one’s address to a specified inquirer would unreasonably invade one’s privacy; and even this, to repeat, would be circumvented when the inquirer employs or asks someone else to request the information.
The number and variety of public agencies to which one routinely provides one’s address should show beyond doubt that one’s address categorically is not the kind of information of which the legislature thought that its public disclosure would constitute (not “facilitate”) an invasion of privacy. The court’s effort to defeat the present request for a public record by misconstruction of the privacy exemption creates unresolved difficulties for the administration of the Public Records Act with little hope for the success which the court seeks to accomplish. I therefore would reverse the decision of the Court of Appeals.
Carson, J., joins in this dissenting opinion.

 Contrast the meaning of “intimate parts” in determining criminal guilt, State v. Woodley, 306 Or 458, 760 P2d 884 (1988).
That “personal” information in ORS 192.502(2) means information specific to named individuals is shown by its illustrative reference to data that may be kept in a “personal, medical or similar file.”

 The statutory phrase, “constitute an unreasonable invasion of privacy,” clearly follows the tort of publicizing private facts first described in 1896 by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandéis and now in Restatement (Second) Torts § 652D. This is not a tort in Oregon, see Anderson v. Fisher Broadcasting Co., 300 Or 452, 712 P2d 803 (1986), Humphers v. First Interstate Bank, 298 Or 706, 696 P2d 527 (1985), but that is immaterial to interpreting what the legislature meant by the word “constitute.”