AU WCL Inaugurates Special Freedom of Information Act Award
Award named for Robert Vaughn, presented to Thomas Susman
Contact: Diane Bickel, WCL Office of Public Relations, 202-274-4276WASHINGTON, D.C. (March 18, 2008)—On March 17, the beginning of “Sunshine Week,” a national initiative to create open dialog about the importance of open government and freedom of information, American University’s Washington College of Law (WCL) presented its inaugural “Robert Vaughn FOIA Legend Award” to Thomas M. Susman, a longtime government openness advocate and principal drafter of the 1974 Freedom of Information Act Amendments.
Susman is a partner in the law firm of Ropes & Gray and was recently appointed Government Affairs Director for the American Bar Association.
The award was inaugurated at WCL’s “First Annual Freedom of Information Day Celebration,” an event held by the school’s new Collaboration on Government Secrecy (CGS) to celebrate Freedom of Information Day (FOI Day). Each year, FOI Day commemorates the birthday of James Madison, considered the father of government openness.
Jim Rettig, the president-elect of the American Library Association, a longstanding organizational supporter of annual FOI Day and a long-term client of Susman’s, presented the award to Susman.
The award is named in honor of WCL Professor Robert Vaughn, who in the early 1970s brought a landmark FOIA lawsuit that established the means by which hundreds of such cases each year are litigated, universally known as a “Vaughn Declaration.” Such evidence is submitted whenever a defendant government agency tries to withhold FOIA-requested information. Professor Vaughn gave the keynote speech at the WCL FOI celebration and was on hand for the award presentation.
As it befitted the subject matter of the day, the new award was kept secret until it was presented at the program in front of an audience of more than 100 members of the openness-in-government community.
“We are very pleased to have such a large part of the openness-in-government community on hand at WCL to help recognize Tom’s legendary status, even though neither they nor Tom knew that this award was being inaugurated today,” said CGS Executive Director Daniel J. Metcalfe, a former Department of Justice official who also is a faculty fellow in law and government at WCL.
The remainder of the full-day program was devoted to the major current issues in the government openness area: implementation of the 2007 FOIA Amendments, “international transparency,” “pseudosecrecy,” and the use of the “state secrets privilege.” WCL brought a group of fifteen leading experts to discuss these subjects at length.
The CGS program also featured a luncheon speech by United States District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, former presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and soon to be chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. He drew upon his vast experience in government secrecy to address all attendees in support of the program.
CGS played a major role in the largely media-related ‘Sunshine Week” 2008 activities and attracted an exceptionally large crowd to its law-oriented program. The next CGS program will be its commemoration of “International Right-to-Know Day” on Monday, September 29, 2008.
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