Troubling Transparency brings together leading scholars from different disciplines to analyze freedom of information policies in the United States and abroad—how they are working, how they are failing, and how they might be improved, especially the mixed legacy and effectiveness of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

David E. Pozen is a professor of law at Columbia Law School and an internationally noted scholar of constitutional law and informational law. Pozen served as the inaugural visiting scholar at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University during the 2017–2018 academic year.

Michael Schudson is a professor of journalism at the Columbia Journalism School. A MacArthur Foundation fellow, he is the author of eight books, including, most recently, The Rise of the Right to Know: Politics and the Culture of Transparency, 1945–1975 (2015).

Jonathan Manes, University at Buffalo:
Troubling Transparency comprises the most important contemporary scholarship on FOIA and its place in the ecosystem of government transparency. Each chapter provides a fresh, often bracing perspective on FOIA’s foundations, its functions, and whether it is serving the lofty democratic and good-government objectives that it was meant to advance. Essential reading for any scholar of government secrecy or accountability.

Tim Wu, Columbia University:
An essential intervention that collects the best thinking on the complex relationship between transparency and democracy.

Jane Mansbridge, Harvard University:
A breakthrough volume, which stops treating transparency as an obvious good and looks carefully at its costs as well as its benefits. These are the careful studies we’ve been waiting for.

David Cole, National Legal Director, ACLU, Professor, Georgetown University Law Center:
Is transparency part of the solution or part of the problem of modern democracy? Bringing together some of the world’s leading scholars and practitioners of transparency law, this volume reassesses where we stand fifty years after enactment of the Freedom of Information Act. Its essays offer critical reflections, affirmative fixes, and comparative evaluations, ultimately shedding invaluable light on the romantic notion that sunlight is the best disinfectant.