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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Implausibility Of Secrecy, Mark Fenster
The Implausibility Of Secrecy, Mark Fenster
Mark Fenster
Government secrecy frequently fails. Despite the executive branch’s obsessive hoarding of certain kinds of documents and its constitutional authority to do so, recent high-profile events—among them the WikiLeaks episode, the Obama administration’s celebrated leak prosecutions, and the widespread disclosure by high-level officials of flattering confidential information to sympathetic reporters—undercut the image of a state that can classify and control its information. The effort to control government information requires human, bureaucratic, technological, and textual mechanisms that regularly founder or collapse in an administrative state, sometimes immediately and sometimes after an interval. Leaks, mistakes, open sources—each of these constitutes a path out …
The Adoption Of Transparency Policies In Global Governance Institutions: Justifications, Effects, And Implications, Megan Donaldson, Benedict Kingsbury
The Adoption Of Transparency Policies In Global Governance Institutions: Justifications, Effects, And Implications, Megan Donaldson, Benedict Kingsbury
Megan A Donaldson
Formal transparency policies are increasingly prevalent in global governance institutions, partially attenuating the influence in these institutions of practices of secrecy inherited from interstate diplomacy. This article assesses the incidence and specific characteristics of formal transparency policies across a select group of institutions and outlines some of the justifications given for these policies - including justifications based on the publicness of these institutions - and for the more controversial exceptions to transparency, such as the exception for deliberative materials. It examines three drivers affecting the adoption, form, and content of transparency policies and other transparency measures in these institutions: spillover …