Freelance journalist Benjamin Shore won’t have to stop filing public records requests in South Jersey after a judge dismissed Cherry Hill schools’ lawsuit alleging that his requests amounted to harassment.
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The Cherry Hill Board of Education filed a 128-page lawsuit in Superior Court in February claiming that the “numerous, repeated and vexatious” requests that Shore filed under New Jersey’s Open Public Records Act qualified as harassment and “substantially interrupted” school operations.
Shore operates the online outlet Shore Investigates, a news site focused on Cherry Hill. His brother Daniel was also named in the lawsuit.
The suit sought to bar Shore and his outlet from submitting requests for public documents for one year. It also sought to shut down an online portal that Shore created where the public can file requests instead of using the district’s website.
“The Board tried to stop us from requesting records,” Benjamin Shore said in an email following the dismissal. “Instead, the case ended with its complaint dismissed with prejudice and its unsupported allegations rejected. Shore Investigates will continue following the records, asking difficult questions, and keeping the public informed.”
Cherry Hill Public Schools did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The school board’s lawsuit specifically referenced 18 OPRA requests that Shore had filed over the course of a year and a half, averaging out to roughly one request per month.
The board claimed that as a result, district personnel, including the custodian of records, spent more than 100 hours reviewing and redacting documents and responding to Shore’s requests.
Shore argued that the amount and frequency of his requests is in line with standard journalistic practice.
Superior Court Judge Michael Mikulski agreed, dismissing the suit on July 31 stating that the district failed to provide evidence of Shore’s ill-intent.
Instead, the judge found that Shore actually displayed a “willingness to cooperate with the Board in making the requests less intrusive,” he wrote in the seven-page ruling.
“The Court finds the Board has failed to establish by clear and convincing evidence that Defendants filed their requests with the intent to disrupt agency operations,” the ruling concluded.
Mikulski determined that the suit met the requirements to be dismissed under New Jersey’s Uniform Public Expression Protection Act, which is meant to shield people from baseless lawsuits meant to silence political speech or engagement.
The law allows defendants to request an early, expedited dismissal of a lawsuit and to recover legal fees if the suit is ultimately tossed.
While Shore succeeded in getting the case thrown out, he said it still had its intended effect.
“The lawsuit nevertheless accomplished something before it was dismissed: it chilled our reporting. We paused records requests and held back stories because every new inquiry appeared to carry the threat of further litigation,” Shore said. “That is what it means to report with a target on your back.”
New Jersey’s new open records laws
The district’s lawsuit was possible thanks to a controversial June 2024 bill signed by then-Gov. Phil Murphy that overhauled the state’s existing public records laws.
The new law enables governmental entities like Cherry Hill’s Board of Education to sue someone seeking public information if they can prove the request amounts to harassment or substantially prevents them from doing their jobs.
The new law also no longer guarantees that people who successfully overturn record request denials in court can recoup their legal fees.
“We knew when they amended OPRA in 2024 to include this provision that it would sadly be weaponized to retaliate against people who seek public records,” Shore’s attorney, CJ Griffin, said in a statement. “But thankfully the trial court agreed this suit had no merit and that my clients were nothing but polite and had no intention of disrupting agency operations — they simply wanted government records to report on matters of public concern.”
“No one should be hauled into court for filing public records requests, especially not reporters who keep us informed about the public business,” Griffin said.
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