Sander

Appellants and petitioners Richard Sander and the First Amendment Coalition (Petitioners) challenge the trial court's denial of their petition for writ of mandate seeking to obtain information from the State Bar of California's bar admissions database. Specifically, Petitioners seek individually unidentifiable records for all applicants to the California Bar Examination from 1972 to 2008 in the following categories: race or ethnicity, law school, transfer status, year of law school graduation, law school and undergraduate GPA, LSAT scores, and performance on the bar examination. Making these records available to the public in a manner that protects the applicants' privacy and anonymity, they believe, will allow researchers to study the *280 potential relationship between preferential admissions programs in higher education and a gap in bar passage rates between racial and ethnic groups.

Following a bench trial, the superior court upheld the State Bar's denial of Petitioners' request on five independent grounds. We need address only the first of them. The court correctly found Petitioners' request to be beyond the purview of the California Public Records Act ( Gov. Code § 6250 et…