Several municipalities are in litigation with the organization Rise Against Hate over requests for residents’ email addresses. One of these cases, involving Cherry Hill, is pending in the Appellate Division. Cherry Hill appealed the trial court’s ruling that OPRA’s privacy section does not protect email addresses from disclosure.

There is no precedential case law on whether email addresses must be disclosed under OPRA. I think there’s a strong argument that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their email addresses, and therefore this information should typically not be obtainable through an OPRA request. However, I’m not confident the court will agree with this position, in view of the extremely limited effect the Supreme Court and the Appellate Division have given to OPRA’s privacy provision in recent cases.

The Cherry Hill appeal presents another important issue, which I’ve never seen raised before: whether a requestor is permitted to refile its OPRA request, after the custodian denied the request and the requestor did not file a court challenge to the denial within the 45-day statute of limitations. The trial judge concluded that a requestor may submit the same request again, despite the failure to meet the statute of limitations, on the ground that OPRA does not prohibit requestors from refiling their requests.

This determination is plainly incorrect. It misses the point that the Supreme Court expressly held that OPRA has a 45-day statute of limitations for requestors who want to challenge a denial in the Law Division. Mason v. City of Hoboken. The trial court’s decision makes the Supreme Court’s decision meaningless, by allowing requestors who fail to meet the complaint filing deadline to simply file the same request again. The result is that there is no statute of limitations–precisely the opposite of what the Supreme Court mandated.