# Fort Bend Indep. Sch. Dist. v. Paxton

Supreme Court of Texas, No. 23-0679

**Fort Bend Indep. Sch. Dist. v. Paxton, No. 23-0679, is before the Supreme Court of Texas. Key issue: The Court denied rehearing of its denial of Fort Bend ISD's petition for review of a ruling that phone logs of district representatives' personal cell phones are public information subject to the Public Information Act to the extent they concern public business, and Justice Young concurred, calling the district's privacy arguments serious but not persuasive on this record.**

Practice areas: open records, federal constitution, texas constitution

## Key issues

- The Court denied rehearing of its denial of Fort Bend ISD's petition for review of a ruling that phone logs of district representatives' personal cell phones are public information subject to the Public Information Act to the extent they concern public business, and Justice Young concurred, calling the district's privacy arguments serious but not persuasive on this record.
- The concurrence said that in an appropriate case, such as one where government requires employees to give up privacy in their own phones, the Court should carefully consider how the Act applies to privately owned cell phones and the effect of the federal and Texas search-and-seizure provisions, and he would be inclined to grant review.

## Factual History
A requestor asked Fort Bend Independent School District for "detailed phone records, including, but not limited to, text messages, photo messages and inbound and outbound calls" on any device on which district business is conducted, for named representatives, "redacted to exclude personal phone calls and any other information made confidential under state law" (Young, J., concurring, PDF p. 2). The district withheld the phone logs of its representatives' personal cell phones, sent a sample to the Attorney General, and requested a decision; the Attorney General's office responded that a governmental body may not circumvent the Public Information Act by conducting public business in a private medium, so to the extent the calls were made in connection with the district's public business the information is subject to the Act and must be released unless excepted (Young, J., concurring, PDF pp. 2-3).

## Procedural History
The district sued the Attorney General under Government Code section 552.324; the trial court signed a final judgment requiring disclosure and the Third Court of Appeals affirmed (Young, J., concurring, PDF p. 3). The district petitioned for review on September 27, 2023, and the Attorney General responded on January 30, 2024; the Court requested briefs on the merits on May 31, 2024, and the district and the Attorney General filed them on July 31 and October 9, 2024, followed by the district's reply on November 14, 2024 (Docket). The Court denied the petition on January 31, 2025, and the district moved for rehearing on March 26, 2025; the Court denied rehearing on September 19, 2025, and Justice Young filed an opinion concurring in the denial (Docket; Young, J., concurring, PDF pp. 1, 3, 7).

## Issues Presented
The district presents whether the court of appeals nullified part of the Act by stretching "produce" beyond its ordinary usage, whether its decision compels the district to violate the federal Telephone Records and Privacy Protection Act and the Fourth Amendment and its Texas counterpart, whether it conflicts with how federal and other states' open-records laws treat call logs, and whether it compels an unreasonable result (Petition for Review (Fort Bend Independent School District), PDF p. 8; Brief on the Merits (Fort Bend Independent School District), PDF p. 16). The Attorney General states the question as whether, under the Act's plain language, information that the district's trustees and employees created while conducting official district business is public information (Brief on the Merits (Ken Paxton), PDF p. 10). The Court did not decide those questions, and the concurrence describes the district's arguments as including that the logs were "produced" by phone companies, not employees, and that disclosure would violate its representatives' constitutional privacy rights (Young, J., concurring, PDF p. 3).

## Legal Arguments
**Whether personal-phone call and text logs concerning district business are "public information."**

**Petitioner (Fort Bend ISD):** The Attorney General ordered the district to collect and disclose private call and text logs created by third-party carriers; the court of appeals' reading contradicts the ordinary meaning of "produce," nullifies one of the Act's three definitions of public information, conflicts with this Court's precedent that information becomes public when used in connection with official business, and is at odds with federal and state privacy law (Brief on the Merits (Fort Bend Independent School District), PDF p. 20).

**Respondent (the Attorney General):** The Act defines public information to include information produced by the district's trustees and employees while transacting official business, even if the district never used it, and information is produced in connection with official business if it is created by, transmitted to, or received by an officer or employee (Brief on the Merits (Ken Paxton), PDF p. 14).

## Stated Reasons the Court Should Take the Case
The district argued that the case's simple, uncontested facts make it an ideal vehicle for the Court to address wide-ranging statewide issues, and that because administrative appeals under the Act are filed exclusively in Travis County, further percolation is unlikely (Reply to Response (Fort Bend I.S.D), PDF p. 5). Justice Young wrote that denying review expresses no view of the merits and that the Court will need to consider in an appropriate case how the Act applies to privately owned cell phones (Young, J., concurring, PDF p. 7).

## Practice Area Tags
open-records, federal-constitution, texas-constitution

## Procedural Posture/Vehicle
Petition for review from the Third Court of Appeals in a Public Information Act suit against the Attorney General; the petition was denied on January 31, 2025, and rehearing was denied on September 19, 2025, with a concurrence in the denial of rehearing (Docket; Young, J., concurring, PDF p. 1).

## Amicus Involvement
- [Texas Association of School Boards Legal Assistance Fund](https://search.txcourts.gov/SearchMedia.aspx?MediaVersionID=83d57a89-4d97-4cdf-889c-129e36a0a134&coa=cossup&DT=BRIEFS&MediaID=93a48179-8975-4833-b383-7d371d934d03) filed an amicus curiae brief on November 14, 2023, at the petition stage.
- [Texas-American Federation of Teachers and the Texas State Employees Union](https://search.txcourts.gov/SearchMedia.aspx?MediaVersionID=c4f0e6aa-cda4-4fe0-b3bf-281878274041&coa=cossup&DT=BRIEFS&MediaID=66048166-efdc-4baf-806f-524d7751f4b5) filed an amicus curiae brief on November 15, 2024, and filed another [amicus curiae brief](https://search.txcourts.gov/SearchMedia.aspx?MediaVersionID=1a4cb54e-39ab-4d0b-a9b3-d72e1ce92c85&coa=cossup&DT=BRIEFS&MediaID=8cd39cfe-9dae-498e-99b2-370f73fc7298) on May 7, 2025, while rehearing was pending.

## Court's Reasoning
The Court denied rehearing without an opinion of the Court, and Justice Young concurred in the denial (Young, J., concurring, PDF p. 1). He wrote that governmental units cannot insulate themselves from the Act by requiring employees to conduct official business on personal devices, but that forcing employees to yield their own devices to invasive searches for public information commingled with private data implicates countervailing interests of possible constitutional dimension, including under the Fourth Amendment and article I, section 9 of the Texas Constitution (Young, J., concurring, PDF pp. 1-4). He said the district's concerns warrant serious consideration, noting that its trustees are unpaid volunteers and that requiring public servants to give up digital privacy could deter public service, but he concluded that this case is not an ideal vehicle (Young, J., concurring, PDF pp. 2, 4-5). The requestor asked that personal calls and confidential information be redacted, the Attorney General's ruling reaches only calls connected with public business, and the Act excepts confidential information, so the district need not disclose its representatives' personal information (Young, J., concurring, PDF pp. 5-6). He added that each employee has a duty to comply with the Act and is best placed to decide which calls were business-related, so the district need not search employees' phones, and that if a case arose in which the government required employees to waive their privacy in their own phones he would be inclined to grant review (Young, J., concurring, PDF p. 6). He also observed that the concerns might be eased by providing employees the equipment they need, including cell phones, though allocating public resources is not the judiciary's role (Young, J., concurring, PDF pp. 6-7).

## Disposition
The Court denied the petition for review on January 31, 2025, and denied the district's motion for rehearing on September 19, 2025 (Docket; Young, J., concurring, PDF pp. 3, 7).

## Vote Breakdown
Justice Young filed an opinion concurring in the denial of the motion for rehearing (Young, J., concurring, PDF p. 1).


---
Source: The SCOTX Report, https://scotxreport.com/cases/23-0679. AI-generated summary of the Court's opinion, orders and the parties' briefs, with pin cites to the page of each document; verify against the Court's own documents at search.txcourts.gov.