In a departure from legal precedent, a Georgia judge has ruled that Mercer University, a private institution, must make its campus crime records public to comply with the state's open-records laws.

The decision is the result of a complaint filed last November by Amanda A. Farahany, an Atlanta lawyer representing a former Mercer student who says she was raped on the campus in 2000.

Ms. Farahany had sought university police records pertaining to sexual assaults on the campus going back to the early 1990s. Mercer had refused the request, contending that its police force is not a public agency and that as a private institution it was exempt from open-records laws.

Yet in his ruling, Superior Court Judge L.A. McConnell Jr. wrote that "the public's interest in safety and in the transparency of public affairs outweighs Mercer's interest in protecting the privacy of the university and its students."

The ruling, filed Wednesday in the Superior Court of Bibb County, also rejects Mercer's argument that its police force does not perform public functions. Mercer's police officers are certified by the state and have the power to make arrests.

S. Daniel Carter, vice president of Security on Campus, a nonprofit watchdog group that monitors crime on campuses, hailed the decision as a victory for students.

Private colleges, Mr. Carter said, should not have "incentive to operate their police departments as a black hole, where crime can be dealt with privately, without the public being able to be aware of extent of crime on the campus."

At least two other colleges are involved in disputes over campus-police records. Last summer the student newspaper at Harvard University, the Harvard Crimson, filed a lawsuit seeking to force the institution to release its campus police records. The Ithaca Journal, a newspaper in New York, is seeking access to campus police reports at Cornell University.