KNOWING WHEN A RIGHT
IS NOT SELF-ENFORCING

I won. Now I have to decide whether winning is worth enforcing.

The Pennsylvania Office of Open Records issued a Final Determination directing a public entity to produce records. The deadline for compliance passed.

I could interpret continued nonproduction personally. I choose not to.

I don’t know the motivations of the people making those decisions.

What I can observe is the structure the decision creates.

The agency incurs no immediate filing expense by declining to produce the ordered records. The requester, however, may have to commence a court proceeding, pay filing and service expenses, prepare pleadings, navigate procedural requirements, and invest additional time simply to seek enforcement of relief already awarded administratively.

That creates a choice.

I can pursue enforcement.

Or I can document the noncompliance, preserve the Final Determination, record that the ordered production was not received, calculate what enforcement would cost me, and decide that the institutional behavior itself has become part of the administrative record.

I chose to pursue enforcement.

That choice had a cost — a filing fee, a service fee, paperwork, procedural requirements, and time. I asked the court to waive that cost, on the grounds that I could not presently afford it. The court did not grant the request outright. It scheduled an evidentiary hearing, and directed me to bring documentation supporting my income, assets, and expenses.

I was prepared to attend that hearing and substantiate exactly what I had represented.

But the cost that ultimately ended this enforcement action was not financial. It was the courthouse itself.

On repeated prior visits to the Chester County Justice Center, I have been required to surrender or secure assistive electronic devices I rely on because of disability, before proceeding past the lobby. In an earlier proceeding, I specifically requested CART real-time transcription as an auxiliary aid. I did not receive it. I personally paid for outside support instead. That support was subsequently removed from the courtroom, leaving me to proceed without it while I remained responsible for the expense of having tried to secure it.

I do not have reasonable confidence that I can enter that building and participate in another proceeding with effective and equal access. I am not willing to risk an enforcement encounter over a disability-related device to find out. And I am not able to keep privately purchasing access that has, before, been taken away from me anyway.

I discontinued the mandamus action.

This is not a representation that the underlying Right-to-Know matter is resolved, that enforcement was unwarranted, or that the accommodations I needed were unnecessary. It means something narrower and, in its way, more serious: the remedy the law offered required me to enter an environment that has not given me reliable reason to believe I could use it safely and fully.

Choosing not to spend more money does not transform noncompliance into compliance. Choosing not to risk unsafe access does not erase the underlying Final Determination, either. Both remain exactly as true as they were before.

Sometimes administrative literacy means knowing how to pursue the next remedy. Sometimes it means recognizing that a remedy has a cost the law never priced in at all — and that naming that cost honestly, on the record, is itself a form of pursuing it.