Blog readers will know that because UC is a public institution, it is subject to public records requests. Some outside groups have approached various public universities around the country and demanded faculty email correspondence - mainly to make various political points. Note that comparable private universities are not subject to such requests.
A recent court decision involving the U of Virginia protects faculty emails, as described in an article in Inside Higher Ed. An interesting point in the article is that apparently the Virginia legislature took note of the public/private discrepancy and bought the notion that a continued situation in which faculty correspondence was public at public universities but not at private universities put the former in an uncompetitive situation.
You can find the article at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/04/18/virginias-high-court-protects-privacy-researchers-emails
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