Hometown papers should keep eye on legislators after Public Records Act win

In 1869, the Daily Cleveland Herald quoted lawyer John Godfrey Saxe as saying, “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.” That saying, or variants of it, have been repeated so often that it has become accepted knowledge. The fact is, though, the more we know about the origin and development of laws, the better off we are. Bad laws get created in bac...