This chapter shall be known and may be cited as the “Mississippi Public Records Act of 1983.” It is the policy of the Legislature that public records must be available for inspection by any person unless otherwise provided by Chapter 453, Laws of 1996. Furthermore, providing access to public records is a duty of each public body and automation of public records must not erode the right of access to those records. As each agency increases its use of and dependence on electronic record keeping, each agency must ensure reasonable access to records electronically maintained, subject to the rules of records retention.
Miss. Code Ann. § 25-61-1
Short title; legislative policy regarding right of access to records
Known as the Mississippi Public Records Act
The act spans §§ 25–25 (15 sections).
Applied in 14 court decisions — leading case 47 So. 3d 148 - Buckel v. Chaney (2010)
Most recently applied in Mississippi Department of Corrections v. Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center (April 2017)
Laws, 1983, ch. 424, § 1; Laws, 1996, ch. 453, § 1, eff from and after July 1, 1996.
How often courts cite this section
Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
Current official text: Mississippi Code (LexisNexis). Digitized from the UniCourt Code Improvement Commission public-domain capture. Reproduced from public-domain Mississippi statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.