Recording Law for Family Law in Alaska

In Alaska, you can legally record any conversation you are part of without telling the other person. This is called "one-party consent." The law applies uniformly regardless of location, including inside your own home. The key point is that you are one of the people involved in the conversation. Alaska Statutes § 42.20.310(a)(1) bars using an "eavesdropping device" to hear or record an oral conversation without the consent of a party to the conversation. Since you are a party to the conversation, your consent is enough. No home-specific carve-out exists in the eavesdropping chapter (AS 42.20.300–.390), so the rule applies the same way whether the interaction is in your home, at a custody exchange, or anywhere else.

Alaska's recording law only covers "oral conversations," which the statute defines as human speech used to communicate information from one person to another. This includes face-to-face talks, phone calls, and video calls where people are speaking to each other. The definition appears in Alaska Statutes § 42.20.390(9): "'oral communication' means human speech used to communicate information from one party to another." The law does not cover silent video recordings that do not capture any audio. If you record only video with no sound, that is not restricted by Alaska's eavesdropping statute. If you record both video and audio, the audio portion is covered by the one-party consent rule.

You have the right to record on-duty police officers performing their official duties in public. No Alaska statute bars recording an on-duty police officer in public. Because you are a direct participant in the encounter, your own consent satisfies Alaska's one-party consent rule for the audio portion, and no statute addresses video separately. Federal courts covering Alaska have recognized a First Amendment right to record police performing official duties in public places. The Ninth Circuit has held that the First Amendment includes the right to record law enforcement officers engaged in the exercise of their official duties in public places: Fordyce v. City of Seattle, 55 F.3d 436 (9th Cir. 1995), and Askins v. U.S. Dep't of Homeland Security, 899 F.3d 1035, 1044 (9th Cir. 2018).

If you record someone without their consent in a way that violates Alaska's eavesdropping law, you could face criminal penalties. Alaska Statutes § 42.20.330 provides that a person who violates any of the provisions of AS 42.20.300 and 42.20.310 is guilty of a class A misdemeanor. However, the law does not give the person you recorded a private right to sue you in civil court. Only the government can bring criminal charges, not the person whose conversation was recorded. There is no private right of action under AS 42.20.300–.390.

Alaska's one-party consent rule applies to family arguments, custody exchanges, or any other personal conversation where you are present. You can record these conversations to document behavior for later legal proceedings without telling the other person. The law does not care about the relationship between you and the other person — it only matters that you are part of the conversation. Alaska's eavesdropping statute targets third-party interception, not a participant's own recording, as confirmed by Palmer v. State, 604 P.2d 1106, 1108 n.5 (Alaska 1979) (construing the identically-worded predecessor statute AS 11.60.290, later recodified as AS 42.20.310).

While Alaska's one-party consent rule is broad, there are narrow exceptions and related offenses to keep in mind. A separate statute, Alaska Statutes § 11.61.123, criminalizes covertly viewing or recording another person's private exposure of genitals, anus, or female breast, which could theoretically apply to covert recording inside a home or elsewhere involving nudity, but it is not a general home-recording consent rule and is not implicated by recording disputes or police interactions. Additionally, the Alaska Supreme Court has held that under the state constitutional right to privacy (Art. I, § 22), police must obtain a warrant before conducting consensual electronic monitoring through an informant even with one party's consent: State v. Glass, 583 P.2d 872 (Alaska 1978). This restricts government-conducted surveillance operations, not an ordinary civilian's own wearable recording of their own encounters.

Imagine you and your ex-partner are exchanging your child at a public park. You bring a small audio recorder in your pocket. During the exchange, your ex-partner becomes angry and makes threats about taking the child permanently. You record the entire conversation without telling them. Under Alaska law, this recording is legal because you were a participant in the conversation and gave your own consent. The wearer's own consent satisfies the one-party consent rule for the audio portion, and no statute addresses video separately.