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SALT LAKE CITY — Rachel Terry, current Utah Division of Risk Management director and former Utah assistant attorney general, announced her candidacy for Utah attorney general on Thursday morning.
Terry joins Derek Brown in the race to replace current Attorney General Sean Reyes. Brown, a former Utah Republican Party chairman and chief legal counsel to former Sens. Bob Bennett and Orrin Hatch, announced his candidacy after Reyes said he would not seek reelection. Terry is also a Republican candidate.
"I've wanted to run for attorney general for years. I've talked to people about it for a long time and I finally got the nerve up to do it," Terry said after officially filing her candidacy.
If elected, Terry said she wants to prioritize dealing with federal overreach, protecting children and the elderly, examining anticompetitive business practices and providing "clear and consistent advice to our state agencies, our universities and our school districts."
Federal overreach isn't abstract, she said. "It's very personal to how the state works in impacting individuals' lives: the farmers, the ranchers, the hunters and the school districts." She believes that the attorney general's office is "our most effective tool" for dealing with overreach.
Areas where Terry expressed concern over federal overreach include accessing public lands, energy development, grazing rights and agriculture. She said she also is concerned about policies going through the Department of Education and not through legislative bodies.
"Those rules can be really difficult to manage because they're written for universities, but they're applied to K through 12, too," Terry said.
Social media
In addition to those priorities, Terry said she supports what Gov. Spencer Cox and Reyes started with regard to social media and that she would continue what they started.
"I think we have to continue to push back on the social media providers because it is dangerous. It shouldn't be as accessible, it shouldn't be targeting kids the way it does through social media — through the ads and all of the algorithms that impact them," Terry said.
Terry explained that when she was doing investigations for the Utah Board of Education, several cases she came across started with social media. "Now they might then argue, 'Well, it's just a technology tool. We're not the ones who doing the harm.' And I think that's an excuse that we can't accept because we know that these products are creating harm for our (children) and we need to push back."
Age verification for social media is something Terry said she appreciated. She also thinks there's work to be done like "looking at the algorithms that are used and the kinds of products that can be marketed to kids." She added, "There's got to be a better safety mechanism for who can reach out to our children online."
Addressing Utah's law that requires pornography companies to verify the ages of users. Terry said her plan is to "fight to make sure that we can implement the policy and the statutes that we think are best for our state." The law has been challenged by the Free Speech Coalition, which filed a suit in 2023. A judge dismissed the suit and then the group appealed.
The death penalty
With regard to handling the death penalty, Terry spoke about problems with the current system. "It takes a long time, it's expensive, it's constantly open-ended and those are specific things we need to look at and address."
"But as long as that's the law for the state of Utah, I will support it," Terry said, adding that if elected, her job would be to execute the laws decided by Utah legislators.
Working in the civil rights litigation section in the Utah Attorney General's Office was key to her decision to run. She said while working there, she saw firsthand how much the cases taken on by the state impact members of the community.
"They impact how universities work. They impact how the schools work. They impact how the state agencies work," Terry explained.
The work the Attorney General's Office does impacts all Utahns, she said. "I don't think we're doing enough to help them understand that this is their law firm. When you have a problem to solve, you don't call a lobbyist, you don't call a politician usually, you call your lawyer."
"If you have a legal problem, you want a lawyer to help you," Terry continued. "And that's what I will be for the state. I will be their lawyer to solve these problems."
