I had a couple of notes on McBurney v. Young, from the Supreme Court yesterday, which Mike mentions below. I did a short podcast on the case here; for my reaction to the argument, see here.
The Supreme Court in McBurney at page 6 saw FOIA rights as political rights: "The state FOIA essentially represents a mechanism by which those who ultimately hold sovereign power (i.e., the citizens of the Commonwealth) may obtain an accounting from the public officials to whom they delegate the exercise of that power." Mike mentions Stewart Jay's article on the original meaning of Article IV, which Jay thinks applies even to political rights like voting and office-holding, and, one would think, FOIA rights too. But it's hard to square the inclusion of political rights in Article IV with Jay's approval of the very widespread residency limits on such rights (see pages 56 to 59 and notes 268 to 271). Residency requirements are citizenship requirements, at least under the Fourteenth Amendment's "and of the state wherein they reside" state citizenship rule, which I take it was generally seen as declaratory of earlier law (see, e.g., here).
Posted at 10:09 AM