Lawmakers on Wyoming’s Joint Judiciary Committee asked legislative staff to draft a bill tackling frivolous lawsuits, and committed to keep talking about public access to court records.
Both decisions arose from the committee’s first meeting of the 2026 interim, where both House and Senate members outlined the issues they’ll investigate between now and the Legislature’s 2027 general session next winter.
The committee’s next meeting is in August.
Anti-SLAPP legislation
“Strategic lawsuits against public participation” are commonly called SLAPP suits. They’re filed to intimidate opponents and silence critics.
The goal is not to succeed on the merits but to tie up the defendant in lengthy, costly litigation.
“This is not about slander or defamation,” said Idaho state Sen. Brian Lenney, who addressed Wyoming lawmakers Tuesday. “It’s about bogus lawsuits that clearly on their face are just ridiculous.”
Lenney was testifying in support of anti-SLAPP legislation, like the bill he helped to pass in Idaho. Such legislation allows individuals being sued to file a motion for expedited relief. If they can show that they were exercising their free speech rights or other protected expression, a judge can then dismiss the case. That saves the person being sued from the potentially costly process of defending themselves in court.
If the person being sued succeeds, some anti-SLAPP laws include penalties against those who brought the SLAPP suit.
The committee heard from Michelle St. Louis, who is currently being sued for defamation by U.S. House candidate Reid Rasner.
“Regardless of the ultimate outcome, defending this type of case is extraordinarily expensive and time-consuming,” St. Louis told the committee. “For many Wyoming residents, the cost of defending themselves in court can quickly become financially devastating, even when they ultimately prevail. The reality alone creates the chilling effect. When citizens fear this, that speaking publicly about political candidates, business experiences or matters of public concern could result in years of litigation and overwhelming legal expenses, many people will simply just choose to remain silent.”
Most states, as well as Washington, D.C., have enacted anti-SLAPP, free speech protections. Wyoming is one of 10 states with no such law, but legislative staff are now drafting one at the behest of the Judiciary Committee.
That legislation could take the form of what’s called the “Uniform Public Expression Protection Act.” That’s model legislation promoted by the nonprofit Uniform Law Commission that’s been adopted in 16 states. It also has support from the ACLU, various free speech groups and journalistic associations.
Lawmakers will consider a draft bill at their next meeting in August.
Public access to court records
The Judiciary Committee also weighed making it easier for members of the public to access court records.
Some court records, like many involving minors, are completely confidential. But most court records are viewable at county courthouses through public terminals.
Rep. Joe Webb (R-Lyman) told his fellow committee members those records are time-consuming to access and should be available online.
“We're spinning our wheels,” Webb said. “We need public access in Wyoming, because the courts need to be open.”
Rep. Jayme Lien (R-Casper) said she was tired of “hearing excuses” for why court records that are already stored electronically could not be shared online.
“The courts are supposed to be open to the citizens per Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution,” she said. “Is there an appropriate appropriation that we could give to the courts to open the court documents, to take the current cloud or server and turn that into a public-facing technology that the people could access in the state of Wyoming?”
State Court Administrator Elisa Butler said she would look into the price of doing that. She added there were practical and ethical concerns about allowing remote access to the records now available at courthouses to “individual users.”
“What we’re seeing, especially in other states, is the people or the entities that are using those systems the most are not individual entities,” Butler said. “They are people who are data-mining, data-scraping. They are going through every document to try to find the information that they want or need, and sometimes they use it for nefarious purposes … We have no mechanism to prevent that kind of data scraping.”
The committee also heard from Parker Jackson, an attorney with the Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank. He said PACER, the online system where anyone with an account can access federal court records, could serve as a “baseline” model for Wyoming’s own public access system.
“It's actually one of the few areas where the federal government is ahead of us on something,” Jackson said. “It’s still one of the better systems out there as far as public access to records. Yes, it doesn't look pretty, but it gets the job done. We can pull up dockets, we can go find the filings that we need.”
PACER technically charges 10 cents per page, but if a user accesses fewer than 300 pages in a three-month quarter, the entire fee is waived.
“That would get kind of at the concern you raised about having this threshold where we can serve the public without overburdening the system,” he said.
The committee could consider a bill to put those records online, but lawmakers haven’t requested a draft yet. They plan to keep discussing the matter at their next meeting in August.
