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58 Admin. L. Rev. 85 (2006)
The Global Explosion of Freedom of Information Laws

handle is hein.journals/admin58 and id is 93 raw text is: THE GLOBAL EXPLOSION OF FREEDOM OF INFORMATION LAWS JOHN M. ACKERMAN & IRMA E. SANDOVAL-BALLESTEROS* TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ............................................................................................. 85 I. Theory and Impact of Freedom of Information Laws ................. 88 II. Freedom of Information Laws in Practice .................................. 93 A . W hat Is a FOI Law? ............................................................. 93 B . G lobal Statistics .................................................................... 95 C. Variation in Content of FOI Laws ........................................ 99 1. C overage ......................................................................... 99 2. E xem ptions ........................................................................ 10 1 3. E nforcem ent ....................................................................... 105 4. E ase of A ccess ................................................................... 108 D. Categories of Countries with FOI Laws .................................. 109 E. Comparative Historical Lessons .............................................. 115 1. FOI Laws Are Political Creatures ...................................... 115 2. The Centrality of Civil Society .......................................... 119 3. The Role of International Actors ....................................... 121 III. Challenges for the Future ................................................................ 123 INTRODUCTION A global wave of innovation in administrative law has gone virtually unnoticed by the community of legal scholars. Twenty years ago only ten nations had laws that specifically guaranteed the rights of citizens to access * John M. Ackerman is Professor and Coordinator of the Research Program on Accountability, Legality, and the Rule of Law at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences in Mexico City (FLACSO-Mexico). Irma E. Sandoval-Ballesteros is Professor and Director of the Laboratory for the Documentation and Analysis of Corruption & Transparency at the Institute for Social Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (IIS-UNAM). The authors would like to thank Bruce Ackerman, Susan Rose- Ackerman, David Banisar, Pedro Salazar, Mauricio Merino, Ricardo Becerra, and Netzai Sandoval for their helpful comments on previous versions of this Article as well as Mexico's Federal Institute for Access to Public Information for funding support.

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