What You Need to Know About Tennessee Public Records & Open Meetings

Understand the Tennessee open meetings and public records laws and how they apply to you.

The Tennessee public records law grants citizens access to governmental documents and helps ensure transparency in governmental affairs. Many practitioners, however, find the actual mechanics of the records requests to be a maze of complicated, confusing, and seemingly contradictory statutes and terminology. You will get an inside track on the current state of the development of public records law in Tennessee, the potential pitfalls for both requestors and custodians, and the hot new topics in this rapidly developing area of the law.

Learning Objectives

- You will be able to define the terms ‘public records', ‘promptly', ‘practicable', and ‘denial'.

- You will be able to identify a denial of a public records request and the exact moment that the response legally became a denial.

- You will be able to recognize willful denials of access to public records and be to correctly ascertain how the custodian could have avoided the finding of willful denial.

- You will be able to explain how to make a good public records request and how to effectively and legally respond to a public records request.