(Louisiana Illuminator) — Three elected judges in Louisiana are leveraging a new privacy law to remove their home addresses and spouse’s work addresses from the state’s public campaign finance database that tracks political donations and spending.
The Louisiana Board of Ethics wants to know the extent to which it has to comply with these requests. It asked Attorney General Liz Murrill in June for a legal opinion clarifying the requirements it must meet, but Murrill’s office hasn’t issued its response yet.
Judges can demand a large swath of personal information be taken down from government and privately-operated websites under a law that went into effect in February. The statute conflicts with longstanding laws meant to ensure government and election transparency that the ethics board traditionally follows.
The ethics board is likely to have far more than three requests for redactions in 2026. Starting in February, hundreds of additional elected officials will also be eligible to ask for their personal information, as well as their family members’ information, to be removed from campaign finance and personal disclosure databases.
Louisiana lawmakers voted earlier this year to expand the list of people entitled to keep their personal information private to include state lawmakers, statewide elected officials, public service commissioners, district attorneys, assistant district attorneys and district attorney investigators.
The privilege will also be extended to the people who live with them, such as spouses, children and other dependents.
The privacy law was intended to protect public officials and their families from harassment and violence. But government transparency advocates warned it will make it easier for public servants to hide conflicts of interest.
“[The law] is well-intentioned but really problematic,” said David Cuillier, director of The Freedom of Information Project at the University of Florida. “All it is going to do is end up having corrupt politicians hide from the public.”
All active and retired judges — those at the city, state and federal levels — have the option of asking the ethics board to remove their personal information from its website and campaign finance database. But so far, only three have done so, according to documents received through a public records request.
All three judges preside over the Jefferson Parish Juvenile Court — Barron Burmaster, Amanda Calogero and Jennifer Womble. They sent letters in May asking to have their home addresses and spouse’s business addresses taken off the ethics board’s website.
“This law was proposed because there has been a national increase in violence towards members of the judiciary and was enacted to help protect the members of the Louisiana judiciary and their family members,” said Dawn Palermo, judicial administrator of the Jefferson Parish Juvenile Court, who spoke on behalf of the judges.
In total, the three judges’ requests would require the ethics board to alter 66 separate reports and the campaign finance database housed on its website. These included redactions to forms the judges submitted years ago before they were on the bench.
Burmaster asked for his home address and his wife’s business address to be removed from personal financial disclosure records he filed as a member of the Lafitte Area Independent Levee District from 2008-13, before he became a judge.
Calogero asked for her address to be taken off of old travel disclosure forms for out-of-state conferences she attended while working as a Jefferson Parish prosecutor from 2012-18.
All three judges have asked for addresses to be removed from the section of campaign finance documents that details personal loans their campaigns received.
Burmaster requested that the business address of Barataria Dental, which made a $5,000 loan to his 2013 campaign, be removed because it is his wife’s dental practice.
Calogero asked that her campaign committee chairman’s work address be taken off several campaign finance reports because he is also her husband.
In response to the requests, the ethics board has removed the home addresses and spouse’s work addresses off of the judges’ personal disclosure forms and campaign organizational paperwork that appears on its website.
But the board is holding off on altering any of the campaign finance reports that provide details about donors and loans until Murrill provides more clarification, Ethics Administrator David Bordelon said.
Among the questions the ethics board has for Murrill is whether the new law requires it to remove a home or work address entirely or whether the board can keep the city and state listing available.
Addresses are often used to verify the identity of a contributor or a vendor to a campaign.
For example, an address listing for a campaign contributor named Mike Johnson would help determine whether a campaign donation is coming from the U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson of Benton, Louisiana House Speaker Pro Tempore Mike Johnson of Pineville or a private citizen with the same name.
This is likely to become a much more pressing matter for the ethics board next year. Active judges are prohibited from making political campaign contributions. It is less likely their addresses need to be removed from campaign finance reports other than their own.
But the elected officials who will be entitled to have their personal information redacted in 2026 are among the state’s most prolific political donors. Statewide officials, legislators and their families regularly make contributions to each other.
If even a fraction of them asked for their addresses to be removed from all reports, the number of documents that would have to be altered could easily climb into the thousands.
The ethics board has also asked the attorney general to clarify whether redaction requests only apply to documents shared on the internet. It’s unclear whether a person could make a public records request for a form that has been redacted online and receive an unredacted hardcopy of the same document.
The new privacy law allows public servants to block the publishing of their personal information but also defines “publish” narrowly as “to publicly post or publicly display on the internet.”
“You can still go to those entities and get those pieces of paper. … You are not specifically prohibiting someone from getting the information,” Judge Tiffany Chase, with the Louisiana Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal, told lawmakers while advocating for the bill in 2024.
“It’s just that it cannot be on the internet,” she said.
The purpose of the law was not to hide information from the public, according to Chase. It was to provide a “cooling off” period for a person who might be angry at a judge or elected official to calm down before they get access to the public servant’s home address, she said.
Still, the law has already been used at least once to block access to a judge’s records both online and in person. Louisiana Supreme Court Justice Will Crain used the statute to justify sealing his divorce filings for 11 months. The public wasn’t able to access them electronically or as paper copies at that time.
While the ethics board primarily deals with home and work addresses, the new law allows judges — and soon many more elected officials — to demand the removal of a far larger swath of information from social media and websites.
Under the law, public servants can also ask for the removal of their license plate numbers, vehicle identification numbers, marital records, birth dates, a child’s school or daycare, and places of worship, among other items, on the internet.
These demands for redactions can be made to governments, businesses and private individuals, including those who share a social media post or who use that information in a news story.
The penalties for not complying are severe. The law allows judges — and soon hundreds of other elected officials — to sue public bodies and individuals for damages for refusing to remove their protected information.
A violation of the law could also result in criminal misdemeanor charges that carry a sentence of up to 90 days in prison or a $1,000 fine.
This could be part of the reason why the ethics board might ask state lawmakers for an exemption to the law, Bordelon said. If granted, it wouldn’t have to remove the public information from its website.
Legislators have already carved out one such exception for the Secretary of State’s office. That agency oversees candidate qualification forms, voter registration information and business ownership paperwork.
Secretary of State Nancy Landry, R-Lafayette, said her agency wouldn’t have enough manpower to meet the redaction requests it could receive. She argued for the agency to be exempt from the requirement.
