Public records laws promise that government works in the open, and then supply nine exemptions and a stack of procedural rules that decide what actually gets released. This article explains how those laws really operate: what counts as a record, who must respond, what the deadlines mean in practice, and why the same request produces different results in different agencies. It walks through the federal exemptions one by one, with the cases that define them, and explains why the deliberative process and privacy exemptions do the most work. It covers fee categories and waivers, expedited processing, the administrative appeal that most requesters skip, and what litigation actually accomplishes. It covers open meetings laws and their exceptions, and closes with the practical craft of writing a request that gets answered.