Rest in Peace Matt Cardinale

Some sad news to report.

Most of you don’t know who Matt Cardinale was, he wasn’t a sleuth, he wasn’t even someone that I had spoken to. He was an activist who had founded an outlet called Atlanta Progressive News in 2005. An obituary shows what I came to appreciate from afar, Matt was tough.

He left home at 14 years old and was emancipated at 16. On full scholarship, he would go on to complete numerous college degrees. He grew up in Florida before attending school in New Orleans, and moved to Atlanta after being impacted by Hurricane Katrina.

It was in Atlanta that Matt began advocating aggressively to defend Georgia’s Open Meetings Act, along with Georgia’s Open Records law. He filed numerous pro se lawsuits to compel government officials to comply with their obligations under the law, and eventually earned a law degree of his own.

One of his numerous lawsuits, Cardinale v Keane, established important precedent for me in the pursuit of our own litigation. It was actually that case, decided in early 2022, that I read about and caused me to research the law further.

In that, he had a profound impact on me. Our politics didn’t agree but we aligned in our commitment to see government officials held accountable to the laws that, we the people, created.

I was a huge fan of reading the dockets of cases he was apart of, a few of them turned into incredible messes of amended filings that you’d need a flowchart to keep track of, but he was a great litigator even while he was pro se.

Matt was only 44 years old. He will be missed.