Paper Trail.

The article focuses on a professor in University of Georgia who used a state law to get colleagues' e-mail messages and other records. Upset after the department voted narrowly against hiring his wife, Alexei Kojevnikov, a historian of science, got hold of records and e-mail messages of his dean, his department chairman, and four of his colleagues. Like most states, Georgia has an open-records law, or "sunshine law," which allows anyone to receive copies of records created by public employees, including faculty members at public universities. The professor has taken advantage of that. He suspects that Robert A. Pratt, chairman of the history department, sabotaged his efforts to get Kojevnikov's wife, Jessica Wang, a job in the department.