Meet CJ Griffin, one of New Jersey’s fiercest advocates for government transparency

Editor’s note: This is the first story in an ongoing series profiling New Jersey residents who are working to strengthen democracy in the Garden State.

CJ Griffin was a high school senior when she saw a sign at a grocery store that stopped her in her tracks—“God hates fags.”

So she wrote a clear-headed letter to then-U.S. Rep. Sam Brownback, encouraging him to support employment protection for gay workers. The glowering response from her Republican senator was even more disturbing.

“It was something like, ‘You’re immoral,'” Griffin told The Jersey Vindicator. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s so wrong.'”

That encounter taught her that the government doesn’t always work in the best interests of the people. It was a valuable lesson that she carried with her through college and law school and still guides her today.

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Now, decades later, Griffin has become a force to be reckoned with as a relentless advocate for governmental transparency in New Jersey. As a partner at Pashman Stein, she is director of the law firm’s Public Interest Center and has built a reputation as an Atticus Finch in the public’s right to access government records.

She has argued before the New Jersey Supreme Court numerous times and has been involved in nearly 80 cases resulting in published opinions—the gold standard for success in the legal profession.

In 2017, the New Jersey Supreme Court issued a landmark decision in one of Griffin’s cases that made use-of-force reports and dashcam videos accessible to the public. A few years ago, she took on the long-accepted notion that certain police records were off-limits. With a string of game-changing court victories, she charted a path for reporters to obtain police internal affairs reports and dashcam videos.

She and other government transparency advocates lost a big battle last year, but she’s continuing to fight. Last year, the state Legislature passed a bill to amend the state’s Open Public Records Act. New Jersey was already one of the least transparent states in the country, and Griffin was convinced the new legislation would only make things worse.

She became the public face of the overwhelming majority of New Jerseyans who wanted the law kept intact. The proposed legislation, she warned, contained a minefield of new restrictions that would roll back decades of progress in the public’s ability to access government records.

Griffin and other transparency advocates focused primarily on how the new law would remove the provision that legal bills must be paid by a government agency when someone wins a lawsuit against that agency over withholding public records. The new law now leaves the decision to award legal fees to a judge’s discretion.

At hearings inside the Statehouse, Griffin commanded the room, urging lawmakers to yank the bill from consideration or vote it down.

“Listen to CJ Griffin,” Mike Davis, a reporter at Asbury Park Press, told lawmakers at one of the hearings. “She knows more about OPRA than anybody that’s been in this room all day.”

It wasn’t enough to convince lawmakers to pull the plug. They moved the bill forward after initially delaying a vote. Griffin—who is usually reserved and polite to her adversaries—used social media as a bullhorn to dispel misinformation and pressure Gov. Phil Murphy into vetoing the bill. Murphy wasn’t persuaded. He signed the bill into law last June; the new, more restrictive public records law went into effect in September.

After strong public pushback, Murphy released a five-page statement explaining why he signed the bill into law. Griffin tweeted that the governor was “gaslighting” the public.

Griffin said that’s not her normal practice, but the attack-dog tactics were necessary because democracy was at stake.

“It’s like a fire alarm—scream and make noise and try to stop it,” she said.

Now, for the time being, Griffin, journalists and other advocates must wait and watch to see how the new law plays out.

“We know it’s going to be bad,” said John Paff, chair of the New Jersey Libertarian Party’s open government advocacy project. “We just don’t know how bad.”

Griffin knows there will be fallout from the new law that cannot be quantified. Prolonged fights for records are common and show the government’s reflexive tendency toward secrecy, she says. She often accepted OPRA cases on contingency—meaning she’d get paid only if she won. Now she must rethink her calculus for deciding whether to take on cases. She will have to decide if cases that don’t possess clear public interest implications are worth the risk of not getting paid.

Before, it was simple: “(If) your rights were violated, I’ll file for you,” Griffin said. Now, she realizes she “can’t help every person in the whole world.”

Advocates expect more cases will end up before the Government Records Council, the state body that referees public records disputes between citizens and agencies, which takes on average about two years to resolve disputes. Under the new law, the agency is getting $6 million to help prepare for the busier docket.

As the effects of the new law have yet to be fully seen, Griffin is grooming the next generation of watchdogs in her OPRA course at Rutgers University. One of the first assignments was to have her students write a records request and submit it to a public agency.

“They were very excited about that real-world assignment,” she said.

And she is meticulously looking for the right case to challenge the legal fees provision in the new OPRA law.

“We’re stuck with the law for a while,” Griffin said. “It’s just been assault after assault on transparency.”

Griffin is also concerned about attempts to consolidate watchdog offices in the state or create a New Jersey version of DOGE.

“It’s alarming they’d want to replicate such a weaponized and wildly unaccountable process, rather than simply giving the Comptroller’s Office a bigger staff to do the type of careful, non-partisan monitoring that they do,” Griffin said. 

 “We’re seeing the world’s richest man and the president making unsupported claims that they have found massive fraud. It’s up to the media to dig and expose that what they are really doing is pushing out partisan propaganda about congressionally approved spending they dislike. But the media is dwindling and even in states like New Jersey, our transparency laws—and even the Comptroller himself—are under attack,” Griffin said. “Unchecked propaganda facilitates the dismantling of democracy, so if we want to save our country and our state, we need to step up and replace these politicians who have dismantled our accountability laws, and we need to invest in our media.

Would you like to nominate a New Jersey resident for our ongoing series “Defenders of Democracy” that profiles the people fighting for a stronger democracy in the Garden State? Contact us to submit your nomination.