A unanimous federal appeals court held on October 27, 2026 that West Virginia’s version of Daniel’s Law, which lets judges, prosecutors, public defenders and police officers sue anyone who publishes their home address, violates the First Amendment. The judges agreed that protecting those officials is a compelling interest. The law failed for a narrower reason: unlike the federal statute and the other state laws the court cited, West Virginia never required an official to ask for removal before suing.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has affirmed a ruling that struck down the central provision of West Virginia’s Daniel’s Law, W. Va. Code § 5A-8-24(e). The published opinion in Jackson v. Thomson Reuters America Corp. (No. 25-2121 and four consolidated appeals) was written by Judge Paul V. Niemeyer and joined by Judges G. Steven Agee and Pamela Harris. It was argued on September 15, 2026 and decided on October 27, 2026.
The plaintiff, Michael Jackson, is a retired law-enforcement officer from Gassaway, West Virginia. He filed five class actions against people-search and data companies: Thomson Reuters America Corp., Whitepages, Inc., Thryv, Inc., LexisNexis Risk Solutions, Inc., and PeopleConnect, Inc. together with five related companies. He alleged that they published his home address and unpublished telephone number, and the same information for “thousands” of other covered officials in the state, without permission. Each suit sought statutory damages of $1,000 per violation, plus attorneys’ fees.
The panel’s bottom line was short. West Virginia “was fully justified in attempting to regulate such speech,” Judge Niemeyer wrote, “but its efforts reached more broadly then necessary to accomplish the task.” (The “then” is the court’s own wording.) Because the state “did not employ the least restrictive means,” the provision “violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments.”
What most coverage misses
Early coverage, including The Record and Bloomberg Law, framed the decision as a win for data brokers. It was one. But the opinion is not a rejection of protecting police and judges. The court and every party agreed that the state’s interest in the safety of judicial and law-enforcement officials is “compelling.” What sank the statute was a drafting choice that West Virginia made alone among the laws the court surveyed.
Under the West Virginia law, liability attached the moment a covered person’s address appeared online. The official did not have to notify the publisher first. The publisher did not have to know the address belonged to a judge or an officer. As the court put it, “West Virginia’s Daniel’s Law alone does not require notification as a precondition of liability.” By contrast, it noted, laws elsewhere let liability arise only after a takedown request is ignored. Delaware’s statute, quoted in the opinion, requires removal “within 72 hours” of a written request.
The practical result, in RSN’s analysis, is that West Virginia’s officers are now worse placed than their counterparts in states that wrote narrower laws. The broader statute has been held unconstitutional by a federal appeals court, while the narrower notice-based laws the court described were not.
Background: the murder that produced Daniel’s Laws
The laws are named for Daniel Anderl, the 20-year-old son of U.S. District Judge Esther Salas of New Jersey. In 2020, a lawyer who was disgruntled over an earlier appearance before Judge Salas found her home address on the internet, dressed as a delivery driver and went to the house with a gun. Daniel answered the door and was shot dead. His father, Judge Salas’s husband, was seriously wounded.
The opinion quotes Judge Salas’s public statement afterwards: “Unfortunately, for my family, . . . the free flow of information from the Internet allowed this sick and depraved human being to find all our personal information and target us.” She added that “federal judges . . . are forced to live in fear for our lives because personal information, like our home addresses, can be easily obtained by anyone seeking to do us or our families harm.”
Congress responded with the Daniel Anderl Judicial Security and Privacy Act of 2022, enacted as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023. States followed. The opinion’s footnote lists laws in Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Missouri, New Jersey and Oklahoma, and notes that California’s provision was repealed in 2026.
West Virginia acted in 2021. Its legislature declared the purpose was “to enhance the safety and security of certain public officials in the justice system” and to let them “carry out their official duties without fear of personal reprisal.” The covered class is broad: “any active, formerly active, or retired judicial officer, prosecutor, federal or state public defender, federal or state assistant public defender, or law-enforcement officer,” along with people living at their homes.
The threat is not hypothetical. The U.S. Marshals Service’s protective investigation statistics record 562 threats against federal judges in fiscal year 2025, involving 395 individual judges, and 472 threats against 341 judges in fiscal year 2026. The 2026 figure is about 16 percent lower than 2025 but still above the 403 recorded in fiscal year 2022. Those figures cover federal judges only, not the state judges and police officers that West Virginia’s law also protected.
The text that failed
The provision at issue reads, as quoted by the court:
“Unless written permission is first obtained from the individual, a person, business, or association shall not disclose, redisclose, or otherwise make available the home address or unpublished home or personal telephone number of any [Covered Person] under circumstances in which a reasonable person would believe that providing such information would expose another to harassment or risk of harm to life or property.”
The law defines “disclose” to include dissemination over the internet and creates a private lawsuit for actual damages “but not less than $1,000 for each violation,” plus punitive damages and attorneys’ fees. According to the West Virginia Code’s own history page for the section, the only bill that has shaped it is Senate Bill 470 of the 2021 regular session. RSN found no later amendment listed there, including after the district court struck the provision down in August 2025.
How the case got here
Jackson’s complaints alleged that the companies were “data brokers” who gathered information from public records, social media and other brokers and sold access to it through “people search” services. He alleged that their services worked differently from government record systems, offering a search that needed “only two pieces of information about a person of interest: name and state.”
The companies moved jointly to dismiss, arguing that the statute was unconstitutional on its face. Retired District Judge Michael F. Urbanski of the Northern District of West Virginia agreed in what the appeals court called “a comprehensive 44-page memorandum opinion.” Judgments were entered on August 19, 2025. Jackson appealed, and the Fourth Circuit consolidated the five appeals on October 21, 2025.
The opinion’s list of counsel shows lawyers for Jackson, for the companies and for three sets of friend-of-the-court (amicus) filers who all supported the companies: the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the Software & Information Industry Association, and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press with other news organizations. No counsel for the State of West Virginia is listed.
Deep dive: the court’s four steps
1. Addresses are speech
Jackson argued the law regulated “pure facts,” not speech. The court said that argument “has some intuitive appeal” but is foreclosed by Supreme Court precedent. It relied on Sorrell v. IMS Health (2011), which described facts as “the beginning point for much of the speech that is most essential to advance human knowledge,” and on Bartnicki v. Vopper (2001): “If the acts of ‘disclosing’ and ‘publishing’ information do not constitute speech, it is hard to imagine what does fall within that category.”
2. The law is content-based
The court then held the law singles out speech by its content, which triggers “strict scrutiny,” the most demanding test in constitutional law. Judge Niemeyer offered a plain example: “a disclosure that a grocery store clerk lives at 100 Main Street is permitted, while a disclosure that a police officer lives at 100 Main Street is prohibited. The only difference between the two disclosures is the communicative content”.
3. Compelling interest, but not narrowly tailored
To survive strict scrutiny, a law must use the “least restrictive means” of serving a compelling interest. Here the court identified two defects. First, liability arose “regardless of whether the data broker had knowledge that the information related to Covered Persons.” A company that published a town directory from public land records would “undoubtedly” violate the law, because some resident would be a police officer or public defender. Because “liability is automatic and cannot be effectively avoided,” the court reasoned, publishers have an incentive to stop publishing anyone’s address.
Second, the statute’s only limit, the “reasonable person” harm clause, limited nothing. The court called it “hardly limiting, as Jackson agreed at oral argument, because every disclosure of a person’s name and address on the Internet exposes that person to harassment or a risk of harm.” It added that Jackson “could not articulate any situation” where a disclosure did not create such exposure. His own complaints said the disclosures “exposed [him] and his peers to harassment and/or risk of harm.” The court concluded that this supposed limit “is actually not limiting but universal.”
The court then pointed to the alternative. Other states “have uniformly required” a removal request before liability attaches, and notice is “the way that Congress and virtually every other State has chosen to narrow their laws.” The panel was careful to add that notice “is one method for narrowing the law” but “not the only way.”
4. No exception applies
Jackson’s fallback arguments also failed. The court declined to treat the case under The Florida Star v. B.J.F. and Smith v. Daily Mail, which concern the press publishing truthful information, and said strict scrutiny would apply anyway. It found no evidence of a historical tradition of regulating directories such as the White Pages. And it rejected treating the disclosures as “commercial speech,” which gets less protection, because “economic motivation alone is insufficient” and the statute applies to commercial and noncommercial speech alike.
The case for the law, and the other side’s arguments
The strongest defense of West Virginia’s approach, in RSN’s assessment, is that a notice-first system puts the burden on the person at risk. A deputy or a prosecutor has to find every site listing his address and send a request to each before the law gives him any remedy. Commercial people-search tools, as Jackson alleged, make finding an address far faster than searching government records. His complaints quoted a 2014 Federal Trade Commission report warning that “people search products can be used to facilitate harassment, or even stalking, and may expose domestic violence victims, law enforcement officers, prosecutors, public officials, or other individuals to retaliation or other harm.”
There is also a fair point about scale. The Marshals Service figures above show hundreds of threats against federal judges each year, and those are only the cases its investigators record. Supporters of strict liability can argue that a notice-only law leaves a window in which an address stays online after a threat has begun.
Against that, the court’s reasoning rests on settled Supreme Court precedent, and the panel was unanimous. Free-speech groups argue the stakes run beyond data brokers. On its case page for the parallel New Jersey appeal, FIRE states: “It is imperative that courts keep the starch in the doctrines that protect our constitutional rights.” News organizations also filed as amici in the West Virginia appeal. In RSN’s reading, the press concern is that a strict-liability rule could reach ordinary reporting that mentions where an official lives.
Conservatives have particular reason to weigh both sides. Police officers and judges have been targets, and the laws were written to protect them. But a rule letting anyone be sued for publishing a true fact without knowing it was covered is the kind of speech restriction conservatives have opposed when aimed at other speakers. In RSN’s view, the court’s answer, that the state may protect officials but must do it narrowly, respects both concerns.
What it means beyond West Virginia
The Fourth Circuit’s decision binds federal courts in Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina. Maryland is on the opinion’s list of states with a Daniel’s Law. The court distinguished laws that require notice, so its reasoning does not directly condemn them.
New Jersey is the larger battleground. On August 12, 2026, the New Jersey Supreme Court held in Atlas Data Privacy Corp. v. We Inform, LLC that “Daniel’s Law does not contain a mental state requirement for actual damages liability.” That law does include a 10-business-day window after a removal request, which the state court declined to read as a negligence standard. The New Jersey court stressed that “the constitutionality of Daniel’s Law is not the issue before this Court,” leaving that question to the federal appeals court. FIRE’s case page lists the Third Circuit appeal as active. The Fourth Circuit cited the federal district court’s New Jersey ruling but did not decide anything about New Jersey’s statute.
Law firm Clark Hill, in an October 28 client note, said the ruling may affect similar statutes in other states and that it is tracking the New Jersey litigation. The questions this site has raised before about who holds sensitive personal data, from the sale of private medical information to undetected IRS searches of public figures’ tax records, apply here too. So do the free-speech concerns RSN raised a decade ago about government control over the internet, and more recently about government limits on who may report.
What is established, disputed and not established
Established (from the opinion and official records):
- A three-judge Fourth Circuit panel unanimously held W. Va. Code § 5A-8-24(e) unconstitutional under the First and Fourteenth Amendments on October 27, 2026, affirming judgments entered on August 19, 2025.
- All parties and the court agreed the state’s interest in the safety of judicial and law-enforcement officials is compelling.
- The law imposed liability without notice or knowledge, with minimum damages of $1,000 per violation.
- The West Virginia Code history page for the section lists only the 2021 bill that created it.
Disputed:
- Whether a notice-first model protects officials well enough, or leaves them exposed while they chase down every listing.
- Whether New Jersey’s law, which has a notice window but no mental-state requirement for actual damages, survives strict scrutiny. That is before the Third Circuit.
Not established:
- Whether Jackson will seek rehearing by the full Fourth Circuit or ask the Supreme Court to review the case. RSN found no public statement either way.
- Whether West Virginia’s legislature or attorney general plans to amend or defend the law. RSN found no public response.
- Whether any threat or attack on a West Virginia official has been traced to a people-search listing. Nothing in the opinion addresses this.
What accountability would look like
- The West Virginia Legislature should amend § 5A-8-24 in its next session with a written-request-and-removal procedure and a fixed deadline, as Delaware’s 72-hour rule does, so that officers again have an enforceable remedy.
- Lawmakers should explain the gap. The district court struck the provision in August 2025, and the Code’s history page shows no amendment since 2021. Voters are entitled to know why no amendment appears there, given that the court had already identified the defect.
- Other states and Congress should check their own laws against the panel’s two tests: a real knowledge or notice limit, and a harm clause that actually narrows liability.
- Data companies that won this case should offer fast, free removal for judges, prosecutors, public defenders and officers whether or not a statute forces them to.
- Officials at risk should be told by their agencies that the West Virginia damages provision has been held unconstitutional by the federal courts, and pointed to the federal protections that still apply to federal judges.
Sources: Fourth Circuit opinion, Jackson v. Thomson Reuters America Corp., No. 25-2121 (Oct. 27, 2026); W. Va. Code § 5A-8-24; U.S. Marshals Service threat statistics; New Jersey Supreme Court, Atlas Data Privacy Corp. v. We Inform, LLC (Aug. 12, 2026); FIRE case page; The Record; Bloomberg Law; Clark Hill.
Image: The West Virginia State Capitol Building in Charleston, WV, by O Palsson, licensed under CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
How this article was made: Right Side News researched and drafted this article with the help of AI tools. Sources are linked so readers can check them. Spot an error? Tell us in the comments and we will correct it.