Law: The County
Part III is the course’s second module. It covers course weeks 6 through 8 and climbs one rung up the ladder of government, from the city of Part II to the county. Counties are easy to overlook and hard to avoid. They run jails and sheriff’s offices, assess property, administer elections, keep land records, and in Colorado, which is one of a handful of states where child welfare is state-supervised but county-administered, they deliver many of the human services that touch residents at their most vulnerable. Boulder County’s 2026 budget resolution spreads $745,186,611 across twenty-three funds (Board of County Commissioners of Boulder County 2025), yet counties draw far less press attention than city councils or legislatures.
Pressure and value
The pressure in this module is exemption: the absence, weakness, or non-enforcement of duties that would require an institution to disclose, explain, and repair what its systems do (Keegan 2026). Exemption takes legal forms (trade-secret claims, statutory carve-outs, computer-crime law) and practical ones (fragmented records, slow responses, fees, and scans no one can search). The value that answers it is oversight, understood in this module as rights, duties, and remedy: a right to ask, a duty to answer, and a pathway that leads somewhere when the answer is no.
Lineage and genre
The lineage is law, and in particular public interest lawyering: the tradition of cause lawyering, legal aid, and strategic litigation that turned formal rights into institutions people could actually use. Law lends this module statutes that start clocks, written grounds for denial, and courts that can order disclosure. The genre is testimony, the form in which evidence reaches a governing body in public and enters its record.
Cases
- National anchors. Sandvig v. Barr and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a federal case that narrowed the legal risk of independently auditing online platforms (American Civil Liberties Union 2019); and the Allegheny Family Screening Tool, a risk-scoring system used by a Pennsylvania county’s child-welfare hotline since 2016, and a model for tools in other counties, including one in Colorado (Ho and Burke 2023).
- Non-US counter-case. NJCM v. the Netherlands, in which a Dutch court held in 2020 that the legislation behind the SyRI welfare-fraud system violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (District Court of The Hague 2020).
- Local case. Records that Boulder County has already released under the Colorado Open Records Act (CORA), as posted in the Public Records Archive of the county’s Open Records Center (https://bouldercountyco.govqa.us/WEBAPP/_rs/supporthome.aspx). You do not file new requests in this module. Each student chooses one or more requests that someone else already filed and the county already answered, and works with the released records. The archive’s request and response metadata (the office, the dates requested and closed, the outcome, redactions, exemptions cited, and fees) is data in its own right, so a request answered late, partly, or not at all is evidence too. The county’s other public records (Board of County Commissioners agendas, minutes, and packets, and budget documents) can supplement the archive. Filing a new CORA request is an optional final-project activity, with the instructor’s approval. This is the county end of Keegan’s (2026) Case 1, “Mining municipal archives”: records formally public but practically opaque.
Portfolio piece
Module 2 ends in Piece 2: Law / County / Testimony, due Friday, February 26, 2027. You submit:
- a technical artifact: tracker entries for the released request(s) you chose from Boulder County’s Public Records Archive; an extraction notebook that turns the released records into a table; and an exemptions and remedy ledger;
- a public text: written testimony (about 1,000 words) and a timed oral statement (recorded, 3–5 minutes) for a Boulder County Board of County Commissioners hearing;
- an installed-base note of about 300 words on the pressure you met, the elements you built and those still missing, with provenance, license, and an AI-use disclosure; and
- for INFO 5871 students, a graduate methods memo of 750–1,000 words.
Weeks
- Week 6. Exemption and the law lineage. Lab: the records tracker and the evidence ledger.
- Week 7. Oversight as remedy. Lab: from released PDFs to a table, and the exemptions and remedy ledger.
- Week 8. Testimony, and the studio for Piece 2. The Thursday of Week 8 is the Midsemester Reading Day, so use it to finish the piece.
Roadmap
8 Exemption: Who Must Answer? names the pressure: an evidence ledger for the Allegheny Family Screening Tool, read against SyRI, that turns gaps into candidate records requests.
9 Law introduces the lineage: public interest lawyering, FOIA and CORA, the CFAA and Sandvig, a CORA tracker in SQLite populated from the county’s Public Records Archive, how to draft (and critically read) a request letter, and an extraction notebook that turns a county budget resolution into a checked table.
10 Oversight develops the value: routine auditability versus episodic audits, escalation pathways tested for accessibility and consequence, and an exemptions and remedy ledger built from released requests in the county’s Public Records Archive.
11 Testimony closes with the genre: a timed oral statement and a written statement for a Board of County Commissioners hearing, and Piece 2.