Fourth Circuit Strikes Down West Virginia Daniel's Law Disclosure Ban in Data Broker Suits

Fourth Circuit Strikes Down West Virginia Daniel's Law Disclosure Ban in Data Broker Suits

The Fourth Circuit held on October 27, 2026 that W. Va. Code § 5A-8-24(e), the provision of West Virginia's Daniel's Law that bars private parties from disclosing covered officials' home addresses and unpublished telephone numbers and gives those officials a damages action for a violation, is facially unconstitutional, affirming the dismissal of five class actions a retired law enforcement officer brought against data brokers and people search companies.

Information last verified on October 30, 2026. This is a developing story; we update it as the record changes.

Jurisdiction scope: This story covers one West Virginia statute, W. Va. Code § 5A-8-24(e), and one federal appellate decision interpreting it. The ruling is binding precedent only in the Fourth Circuit, which hears appeals from West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina and South Carolina. Other states have enacted their own Daniel's Law statutes with different text, and this opinion does not decide those cases. For how state-level privacy and data broker rules differ, see our state privacy law comparison tracker.

What Happened

Michael Jackson, a retired law enforcement officer living in Gassaway, West Virginia, filed five separate putative class actions against five sets of companies: Thomson Reuters America Corp.; Whitepages, Inc.; Thryv, Inc.; PeopleConnect, Inc. together with Intelius LLC, Pubrec LLC, The Control Group Media Company LLC, Instant Checkmate LLC and Truthfinder LLC; and LexisNexis Risk Solutions, Inc. Each complaint alleged that the defendant published his home address and unpublished telephone number online through a people search service, along with the same information for thousands of other covered West Virginia officials, in violation of W. Va. Code § 5A-8-24(e) (slip op. pp. 1 to 3, 8).

Jackson alleged each defendant was a data broker that assembled personal information from public records, social media and other data brokers, then sold access through a search function requiring only a name and a state. He sought declaratory and injunctive relief, statutory damages of $1,000 per violation, and attorneys fees (slip op. pp. 8 to 10).

The defendants moved jointly to dismiss under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6), arguing the provision was facially unconstitutional under the First and Fourteenth Amendments and unconstitutionally vague. In a 44-page memorandum opinion, the district court agreed on the First Amendment ground: it found the provision content based, applied strict scrutiny, accepted that the state interest was compelling, and concluded the law was not narrowly tailored because it lacked a notice or knowledge requirement. Because of that ruling, the district court did not reach the vagueness argument. Judgments issued on August 19, 2025, and the Fourth Circuit consolidated Jackson's appeals by order dated October 21, 2025 (slip op. p. 10).

The appeals were argued on September 15, 2026 and decided on October 27, 2026 before Judges Niemeyer, Agee and Harris, with Judge Niemeyer writing (slip op. p. 4). Philip Lawrence Fraietta of Bursor & Fisher argued for Jackson; Samir I. Deger-Sen of Latham & Watkins argued for the appellees. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the Software & Information Industry Association, and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press with other news and media organizations filed as amici supporting the appellees (slip op. pp. 1 to 4).

The panel framed the question and answered it in a single sentence at the top of the opinion and again in its final paragraph.

Source: Jackson v. Thomson Reuters America Corp., Nos. 25-2121 through 25-2125, slip op. p. 5 (4th Cir. Oct. 27, 2026).

"The issue before us in these five appeals is whether a provision of West Virginia's Daniel's Law, W. Va. Code § 5A-8-24(e), is facially unconstitutional under the First and Fourteenth Amendments."

Source: same opinion, slip op. p. 23.

"Thus, we agree that the provision of West Virginia's Daniel's Law at issue here, W. Va. Code § 5A-8-24(e), violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The judgments of the district court are, accordingly, AFFIRMED."

The opinion traces the law to the 2020 killing of Daniel Anderl, the 20-year-old son of United States District Judge Esther Salas, by a lawyer who found the judge's home address online, and it quotes Judge Salas's statement that the free flow of information from the internet allowed the killer to find the family's personal information. West Virginia enacted its version in 2021 (slip op. p. 6).

What the Law Actually Says

Daniel's Law sits in West Virginia's Public Records Management and Preservation Act. Subsection (a) names the section, and subsection (b) declares the state policy of enhancing the safety and security of judicial officers, prosecutors, public defenders, assistant public defenders and law enforcement officers, plus their immediate family members. Subsection (c) defines "disclose" expansively to include publishing, posting, distributing or disseminating by any means, including electronic transmission and the internet (W. Va. Code § 5A-8-24(a) to (c)).

The provision the Fourth Circuit struck reads, in the statute's own words:

"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 active, formerly active, or retired judicial officer, prosecutor, federal or state public defender, federal or state assistant public defender, or law-enforcement officer 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."

Source: W. Va. Code § 5A-8-24(e) (2021).

Subsection (e)(1) lets a covered person, or anyone residing at that person's home address, sue for a violation. Subsection (e)(2) allows the court to award actual damages of not less than $1,000 for each violation, punitive damages under W. Va. Code § 55-7-29, reasonable attorney's fees and litigation costs, and other preliminary or equitable relief.

The statute is not silent on notice. Subsections (f) and (g) let a covered person or an immediate family member send a written request that the discloser stop and remove the information; subsection (h) requires immediate removal on receipt of such a written request, creates a separate cause of action for injunctive or declaratory relief when a discloser fails to comply, and makes willful refusal to remove within 24 hours of the written request a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $1,000, up to six months confinement, or both. Subsection (d), which applies to state and local government agencies rather than private parties, bars only "knowingly" disclosing the same information. Subsection (i) preserves disclosures required by state or federal law.

The constitutional framework the panel applied is conventional. Content-based speech restrictions are presumptively unconstitutional and must survive strict scrutiny, meaning the government must show the law is narrowly tailored to a compelling interest (Reed v. Town of Gilbert, 576 U.S. 155, 163 (2015), cited slip op. p. 12), and narrow tailoring requires the "least restrictive means" (McCullen v. Coakley, 573 U.S. 464, 478 (2014), cited slip op. p. 12). For a facial First Amendment challenge, the panel asked only whether a substantial number of the law's applications are unconstitutional judged against its plainly legitimate sweep (Moody v. NetChoice, LLC, 603 U.S. 707, 723 (2024), cited slip op. p. 11).

The analysis sits in Part IV, which the panel divided into four lettered subsections. Part A rejected Jackson's threshold argument that the statute regulates data rather than speech, relying on Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc., 564 U.S. 552, 570 (2011), the Fourth Circuit's own Ostergren v. Cuccinelli, 615 F.3d 263 (4th Cir. 2010), and Bartnicki v. Vopper, 532 U.S. 514, 527 (2001) (slip op. pp. 13 to 14). Part B concluded the law is content based on its face, illustrating the point with a hypothetical: under the statute, disclosing that a grocery store clerk lives at 100 Main Street is permitted, while disclosing that a police officer lives at the same address is prohibited, and the only difference is communicative content (slip op. p. 15).

Part C is where the statute failed. The panel held that subsection (e) imposes liability the moment a broker discloses an address or number, whether or not the broker knew the information belonged to a covered person, so a town directory compiled from public land records violates the law unknowingly and the publisher is pushed toward self-censorship, a chilling concern the court tied to Counterman v. Colorado, 600 U.S. 66, 75 (2023) (slip op. p. 16). It then rejected Jackson's argument that the "reasonable person would believe" clause narrows the statute, recording that Jackson agreed at oral argument the clause is hardly limiting, and that he could not articulate any situation in which a disclosure would not expose a covered person to harassment or risk of harm (slip op. p. 17). Finally, the panel compared other jurisdictions, quoting Delaware's requirement that a discloser remove the information within 72 hours of a written request (Del. Code Ann. tit. 10, § 1923(b), cited slip op. p. 18).

Source: slip op. p. 18.

"But West Virginia's Daniel's Law alone does not require notification as a precondition of liability. Thus, this aspect of the law fails to provide the least restrictive means of furthering the law's compelling interest."

The panel immediately limited that observation, and the limitation matters as much as the holding:

Source: slip op. p. 18.

"While we hasten to note that requiring notice prior to imposing liability is one method for narrowing the law, it is not the only way. But it is the way that Congress and virtually every other State has chosen to narrow their laws and render them less speech-restrictive."

Part D dealt with three arguments for escaping strict scrutiny, and rejected each. The panel found the case not sufficiently analogous to The Florida Star v. B.J.F., 491 U.S. 524 (1989), and Smith v. Daily Mail Publishing Co., 443 U.S. 97 (1979), because those cases involved punishing a news organization for publishing lawfully obtained truthful information while this statute creates private rights of action against a far broader group, and it added that even applying that line the standard would still be strict scrutiny under Soderberg v. Carrion, 999 F.3d 962 (4th Cir. 2021) (slip op. p. 19). It rejected a history-and-tradition argument for treating the statute as a traditional confidentiality protection, finding Jackson had not shown that disclosures of the Whitepages and Yellow Pages type have a long history of regulation (slip op. pp. 19 to 20). And it rejected the commercial speech argument, holding that economic motivation alone does not make speech commercial (Bolger v. Youngs Drug Products Corp., 463 U.S. 60, 67 (1983)) and that a statute applying with equal force to commercial and noncommercial messages is not subject to intermediate scrutiny merely because some regulated speech is commercial (City of Austin v. Reagan National Advertising of Austin, LLC, 596 U.S. 61, 68 n.3 (2022)) (slip op. pp. 20 to 21).

The closing section states the ground of decision precisely. The panel wrote that West Virginia "was fully justified in attempting to regulate such speech" given the compelling interest, "but its efforts reached more broadly then necessary to accomplish the task; it did not employ the least restrictive means of doing so. For that reason and only that reason," the court agreed with the district court (slip op. pp. 22 to 23).

Those disclosures largely originate in records the public can already request. Our guide to how public records access works explains the underlying request systems the opinion describes brokers as aggregating.

Analysis: Why This Matters

The following is analysis from the Recording Law Editorial Team.

Read carefully, this opinion is narrower than a headline suggests, and the narrowness is deliberate. The panel did not hold that a state may not protect judges and officers from address exposure. It agreed the interest is compelling (slip op. p. 15). It did not hold that people search data is unprotected or unregulable. It held the opposite about First Amendment coverage, which is why strict scrutiny applied at all (slip op. pp. 13 to 14). The one defect the court named is that subsection (e) is not the least restrictive means available, and the opinion says the failure rests on "that reason and only that reason" (slip op. pp. 22 to 23).

It is worth being precise about the role notice played, because this is easy to flatten. The panel discussed two tailoring problems in Part C: liability without any knowledge requirement, and liability without a removal request as a precondition (slip op. pp. 16 to 18). It then said notice is one way to narrow such a law and not the only way (slip op. p. 18). The court did not state a safe harbor, and nothing in the opinion tells a legislature that adding a notice clause alone would cure the provision, though the panel did adopt the district court's conclusion that the provision fails strict scrutiny 'due to its lack of a notice requirement' and noted that notice is the route Congress and virtually every other state took (slip op. p. 18). Treating the decision as a drafting checklist still reads more into it than the text supports.

One observation of our own, from reading the statute rather than the opinion: West Virginia's Daniel's Law does contain a written-request removal process, in subsections (f) through (h), including a misdemeanor for willful refusal to remove within 24 hours. What it does not do is condition the subsection (e) damages action on that process. The provision the court analyzed is therefore subsection (e) itself, the private-party disclosure ban together with the private action it creates, not the statute's removal machinery, and the opinion's judgment addresses subsection (e) specifically (slip op. pp. 22 to 23).

That distinction also marks the limits of what was decided. The opinion does not pass on subsections (d), (f), (g) or (h), and the vagueness challenge the defendants raised was never reached below in light of the district court's First Amendment ruling (slip op. p. 10). The decision binds federal courts in the Fourth Circuit; we are not predicting how any other court will treat any other statute. The opinion itself notes that New Jersey's Daniel's Law was evaluated under the Florida Star line in Atlas Data Privacy Corp. v. We Inform, LLC, 758 F. Supp. 3d 322 (D.N.J. 2024), with an appeal docketed as No. 25-1587 in the Third Circuit on March 31, 2025 (slip op. p. 19). That matter involves a different statute and remains pending; nothing here resolves it.

For the data broker industry, the practical point is that this ruling takes out one state's private cause of action over private disclosures, not the broader compliance landscape. Registration duties, deletion mechanisms and consumer request obligations in other states rest on different statutory theories and were not before this panel. Our overview of data broker registration requirements and deletion regimes describes those separate frameworks, which this decision leaves untouched.

How This Affects You

If you are a judge, prosecutor, public defender or law enforcement officer in West Virginia, start with what the court actually decided: it held W. Va. Code § 5A-8-24(e) facially unconstitutional and affirmed the dismissal of the five suits brought under it (slip op. pp. 5, 22 to 23). Federal courts in the Fourth Circuit are bound by that holding. The statute's written-request removal provisions in subsections (f) through (h) were not before the panel. What all of that means for a particular claim, pending or contemplated, is a question for a West Virginia lawyer, and we would not assume either that nothing changed or that the whole section is gone.

If you are a member of the public worried about your own address appearing on a people search site, this decision does not change anything about your options, because the statute only ever covered specified justice-system officials and their household members (W. Va. Code § 5A-8-24(b), (c), (e)). The route that remains open to most people is the voluntary opt-out and suppression process each site runs. Our walkthrough of removing your records from people search sites covers how those requests work and how often they need to be repeated.

If you operate a site or service that republishes public records, note what the panel actually relied on. Its concern was liability attaching with no knowledge of a covered person's status and no opportunity to remove on request (slip op. pp. 16 to 18). That reasoning is specific to the text of W. Va. Code § 5A-8-24(e) as applied in the Fourth Circuit and says nothing about statutes drafted differently.

This is general legal information, not legal advice. This article describes one West Virginia statute and one Fourth Circuit decision, verified on October 30, 2026 against the court's published opinion and the West Virginia Code. It does not address other states' statutes, pending appeals elsewhere, or your situation. Consult a licensed attorney in your state before acting on anything here.

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• US data privacy laws hub
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• How to remove your profile from Spokeo
• How to opt out of SmartBackgroundChecks

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Last updated: 2026-10-30. This is a developing story; details verified as of 2026-10-30.

Frequently Asked Questions

What exactly did the Fourth Circuit hold?

It held that W. Va. Code § 5A-8-24(e), the provision of West Virginia's Daniel's Law barring private parties from disclosing covered officials' home addresses and unpublished telephone numbers, is facially unconstitutional under the First and Fourteenth Amendments, and it affirmed the district court judgments dismissing five class actions. The panel reached that result on one ground: the provision is not the least restrictive means of serving the state's compelling interest in official safety (slip op. pp. 5, 15 to 18, 22 to 23).

Did the court rule that West Virginia cannot protect officers' home addresses at all?

No. The panel agreed with all parties that enhancing the safety and security of judicial and law enforcement officials is a compelling government interest, and it said West Virginia was fully justified in attempting to regulate in that area. Its conclusion was that this particular provision reached more broadly than necessary (slip op. pp. 15, 22).

Was the law struck down just because it lacked a notice requirement?

Not exactly. The narrow tailoring discussion identified two problems: liability attaches with no knowledge requirement, and no removal request is a precondition to liability. The panel then said expressly that requiring notice before liability is one method for narrowing such a law and not the only way, though it also adopted the district court's conclusion that the provision fails strict scrutiny 'due to its lack of a notice requirement' (slip op. pp. 16 to 18).

Which companies were the defendants?

Thomson Reuters America Corp. (No. 25-2121), Whitepages, Inc. (No. 25-2122), Thryv, Inc. (No. 25-2123), PeopleConnect, Inc. with Intelius LLC, Pubrec LLC, The Control Group Media Company LLC, Instant Checkmate LLC and Truthfinder LLC (No. 25-2124), and LexisNexis Risk Solutions, Inc. (No. 25-2125) (slip op. pp. 1 to 3).

Does this decision affect Daniel's Law in other states?

It is binding precedent only in the Fourth Circuit, and it construed West Virginia's text. The opinion notes that New Jersey's Daniel's Law was analyzed in Atlas Data Privacy Corp. v. We Inform, LLC, 758 F. Supp. 3d 322 (D.N.J. 2024), with an appeal docketed as No. 25-1587 in the Third Circuit on March 31, 2025, a separate matter this ruling does not decide (slip op. p. 19).

Is the ruling final?

Under Fed. R. App. P. 40(d)(1), a petition for panel rehearing or rehearing en banc is generally due within 14 days after entry of judgment, subject to shortening or extension by order or local rule. The opinion was decided October 27, 2026, so on the default rule the period had not expired as of October 30, 2026. Under Fed. R. App. P. 41(b) the mandate issues 7 days after the rehearing period runs, or 7 days after denial of a timely petition, whichever is later. We did not obtain the Fourth Circuit's local rules or the appellate docket for this case.

Did the court address whether the statute is unconstitutionally vague?

The defendants raised vagueness under the Fourteenth Amendment in their motion to dismiss, but the district court did not consider it in light of its First Amendment ruling, and the Fourth Circuit's opinion resolves the appeals on the free speech ground (slip op. pp. 10, 22 to 23).