ABSTRACT
ACCESS IN PRACTICE Just one day after Barack H. Obama took office as the forty-fourth president of the United States of America, he proposed a new policy for his administration in a memo calling for transparency in the nation’s executive branch of government. That memo succinctly stated the principles of freedom of access to government materials, the first one being that “democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency.”1 The president’s directive ordered a presumption of openness for fifteen executive departments under his watch and seventy-seven federal agencies. He drew upon the metaphor of Associate Justice Louis Brandeis, who advised in an early twentieth-century Harper’s Weekly essay, “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”2
