The Arizona Supreme Court ruled unanimously Friday that the University of Arizona broke the law when it destroyed a public record after a professor requested it, a decision that sets a new standard for how judges review every public records dispute in Arizona.

Former Professor Matthew Abraham began requesting records in 2018 after he was passed over for program director jobs. He asked for hiring and search committee files, survey data and an audio recording of an October 2019 faculty governance committee meeting.

UA released some records, redacted others and withheld the rest. It told Abraham it would delete the recording after making a transcript and offered to let him listen without getting a copy. He declined and asked for a copy again.

After Abraham's attorney sent a demand letter in October 2020, UA acknowledged internally that its earlier instruction to withhold some records "was incorrect," the court noted. By November, the university said the recording was "no longer available."

The opinion, written by Justice Clint Bolick, reverses a Pima County trial court and throws out part of an appeals court ruling that had sided with the Arizona Board of Regents, UA's governing body.

Bolick wrote that the destruction "seems an obvious violation of the statutes" and that a university retention policy "must yield to the statute."

Justices also ordered the case back to a Pima County judge who must now independently scrutinize every document the university withheld.

Abraham can't collect damages over the recording because he didn't file a required notice of claim before suing, but justices said the trial court was wrong to dismiss his request for a ruling that the board broke the law.

Abraham told Tucson Spotlight he suspected early on that the stakes went beyond his own records requests.

"Something kept gnawing at me from the beginning, that the UA was just kind of enacting a risk-management strategy," he said. "Anything that was slightly sensitive, potentially could open the university up to litigation, was going to be denied or redacted or completely withheld."

The Arizona Board of Regents, UA's governing body and the named defendant in Abraham's lawsuit, directed Tucson Spotlight's request for comment to UA, which did not respond.

A yearslong fight

Abraham described the university's response after his attorney's 2020 demand letter as reversing course only briefly.

"They kind of did a mea culpa and said, 'We apologize to Dr. Abraham, we're going to make this right.' And then they just stonewalled for another year," he said.

The UA turned over roughly 1,700 pages of records three days before its legal response in the lawsuit was due, he said, and more than half of the text was blacked out.

"Redacted," he said. "Just pages and pages."

Abraham said the timing made the university's position hard to accept.

"There's no doubt that the lawsuit is the impetus that led them to release those records," he said. "ABOR tried to just portray it as a coincidence."

He said the destroyed recording is what stuck with him most in the ruling.

"There's a difference between stating something is a fact and a judicial determination as to what that means in terms of whether that was a wrongful denial," Abraham said, referring to how Bolick's opinion characterized the destruction as "the ultimate denial."

On the standard of review the court adopted, Abraham said he agreed with the outcome and that courts should never defer to state agencies when an institution claims records should be withheld in the state's best interest.

"The court has to have the final decision," he said.

Six years after his attorney's first demand letter, Abraham said he's still waiting on the case to fully resolve.

"Once you start that battle, there's no turning back," he said.

He's also fighting his firing on two fronts. An administrative appeal of his dismissal is set for a Nov. 20 hearing in Pima County Superior Court. Separately, he's suing ABOR in federal court, alleging his termination was the downstream result of years of retaliation for opposing what he calls race-based hiring practices. That suit stems from a 2022 EEOC complaint over his removal from faculty governance committees.

Why it matters beyond UA

The ruling reaches every public records dispute in Arizona, not just Abraham's. The trial court and the appeals court had reviewed UA's document-by-document withholding decisions only for abuse of discretion, a standard that defers to the agency's judgment.

The Supreme Court said that was wrong: judges must decide independently, or de novo, whether each withheld or redacted document is actually exempt, starting from a strong presumption of disclosure.

That closes a gap the appeals court had opened in 2025, which would have let agencies' withholding calls stand as long as they weren't unreasonable.

The Goldwater Institute, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case, said in a statement the ruling ends an approach that would have left judges rubber-stamping agency decisions instead of scrutinizing them.

Abraham sued in September 2021. UA produced more than 1,700 pages two months later. The trial court found the demand letter was "a crucial turning point" in getting his records but denied him attorney fees, ruling that fees require success within a lawsuit itself.

The Supreme Court agreed a lawsuit is required, but said records released before Abraham sued still count toward whether he "substantially prevailed," the standard for fees.

It called a fee ruling premature until the trial court finishes its document-by-document review.

Justices acknowledged the ruling leaves a gap: agencies have little financial incentive to comply quickly with records requests outside of litigation, and people who can't afford to sue may be denied access to public records altogether.

They said fixing that is a job for the Legislature, not the courts.

The case now returns to Pima County Superior Court, where a judge must review each document UA withheld or redacted, decide independently whether it was properly exempt from disclosure, and then rule on whether Abraham substantially prevailed and is owed attorney fees. No hearing date has been set for the remanded records case.

For Abraham, the ruling's reach matters as much as his own outcome.

"This is a real win for the average person, the people who have every right to access records produced by a state university, a state agency," Abraham said. "They shouldn't have to go hire an attorney and spend thousands of dollars to have the public records law upheld."

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Tucson SpotlightCaitlin Schmidt

Caitlin Schmidt is editor and publisher of Tucson Spotlight. Contact her at caitlin@tucsonspotlight.org.

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