Krakauer’s Heavy Burden: Balancing Students’ Enhanced Right to Privacy Against the Public’s Strong Right to Know

Students have substantial privacy rights in their student records, and a party who seeks the unilateral release of these records has a significantly heavy burden to overcome in order to justify disclosure. In Krakauer v. State ex rel. Christian, the Montana Supreme Court was presented with the question of whether an out-of-state journalist’s right to know sufficiently outweighed the privacy interest of a student in his educational records to allow for the unilateral release of the student’s confidential student records to the journalist