David C. Vladeck

David C. Vladeck, currently on leave from Georgetown Law to serve as the director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, has spent much of his 35-year career as a lawyer seeking to promote transparency in government. As director of the Freedom of Information Clearinghouse and later director of Public Citizen Litigation Group, he handled or supervised more than 70 cases brought under the federal Freedom of Information Act, seeking access to a broad range of information on issues such as CIA experimentation on unwitting subjects; drug, medical-device, food and automotive safety; the wartime record of former Austrian President Kurt Waldheim; the intervention of the Office of Management and Budget in agency rule-making; and environmental protection.

Vladeck also handled many cases seeking to enforce the open-meetings provisions of the Federal Advisory Committee Act and the Sunshine Act. He also helped pioneer the use of unsealing motions to force disclosure of historically sensitive grand jury records, for example, successfully petitioning for the release of the proceedings of the grand jury that indicted Alger Hiss and supervising the filing of a petition to unseal the grand jury proceedings that lead to the indictment of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. At Georgetown Law, Vladeck continued an active FOIA and open-records practice, handling, among others, cases to force the Defense Department to release evidence of environmental contamination at military facilities, the Federal Reserve Bank to release records relating to compliance with the Community Reinvestment Act, and the Agriculture Department to release records of meetings between senior agency officials and industry.

Vladeck also brought the first case in which a federal appeals court held that state laws limiting access to public records to “citizens” of the state violated the Privileges and Immunities Clause of Article IV of the U.S. Constitution (Lee v. Minner). In addition, he writes extensively on open- records issues.