The Supreme Court of New Jersey has ruled that individual fields of data from electronically stored public records are subject to disclosure under the Open Public Records Act.

The justices ruled unanimously that the fields of sender, recipient, subject and date from emails sent by the police chief and municipal clerk in Galloway Township are themselves public records. They overturned an Appellate Division ruling that said providing such data to a records requester would constitute creation of a new document, which would exceed the requirements of OPRA.

“A document is nothing more than a compilation of information—discrete facts and data. By OPRA's language, information in electronic form, even if part of larger document, is itself a government record. Thus, electronically stored information extracted from an email is not the creation of a new record or new information; it is a government record,” Justice Barry Albin wrote for the court.