North Carolina’s highest court has stepped away from a high-profile transparency fight over COVID-era research records at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, leaving a watchdog group frustrated and thousands of pages still hidden from public view.
The state Supreme Court on Friday declined to take up a public-records case over UNC files that US Right to Know says could shed light on the origins of COVID-19. By refusing to hear the dispute, the justices left intact lower-court rulings that let the university withhold thousands of research documents under a state-law exemption.
The court’s petitions list shows the justices denied a request from US Right to Know, according to Carolina Journal. Court filings and the appellate ruling report that UNC produced more than 130,000 pages in response to public-records requests but withheld 5,205 documents, roughly 4,537 of them under the state research exemption. The NC Court of Appeals opinion lays out those totals along with the case’s procedural history.
On Jan. 7, a three-judge appellate panel unanimously affirmed an Orange County trial judge’s October 2024 order and leaned on a tight grammatical reading of the statute. Writing for the court, Judge Jefferson Griffin concluded that “the phrase ‘of a proprietary nature’ solely modifies ‘information,’” a construction that lets universities treat certain research data and records as outside the reach of the Public Records Act. The NC Court of Appeals opinion spells out the court’s textual analysis in detail.
What this means for public access
At the center of the fight is N.C. Gen. Stat. § 116-43.17, which carves out research “data, records, or information of a proprietary nature” produced by state institutions of higher learning from the Public Records Act. The General Assembly’s wording is available in N.C. Gen. Stat. § 116-43.17.
Legal commentators point out that the Court of Appeals leaned heavily on punctuation and the so-called last-antecedent canon, a rule that looks at which words a modifier most directly attaches to. By reading “of a proprietary nature” as linked only to “information,” the court effectively made it easier for public universities to assert the research exemption and keep internal research materials out of public view. A review by Cranfill Sumner walks through how those textual rules drove the outcome.
Reactions and next steps
“We are disappointed in today’s result,” US Right to Know executive director Gary Ruskin told Carolina Journal, arguing that the public deserves as much clarity as possible about how the pandemic began.
UNC’s general counsel countered that the university had already done plenty of disclosure. He told the News & Observer that UNC “produced more than 130,000 pages” and that Supreme Court review was not necessary.
US Right to Know filed its petition asking the Supreme Court to take the case on Jan. 29. With the justices now saying no, the group has publicly indicated it is weighing its options and considering what to do next.
For the moment, the appellate court’s reading means the withheld records will stay sealed unless lawmakers at the General Assembly rewrite the statute or a future court revisits the issue. The fight is a reminder that in the world of public records, even commas and clause placement can decide whether the public ever gets to see what is sitting in a university’s files.
