HARRISBURG — Lawyers for the man fired after just days as head of Pennsylvania’s open records office told a panel of state judges on Wednesday that lawmakers made it clear in the Right-to-Know Law that they wanted the job to be independent of the governor who is now trying to replace him.

Commonwealth Court heard 90 minutes of argument in the lawsuit brought by Erik Arneson, a longtime Republican Senate aide who was fired by Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf in January after spending just days as executive director of the Office of Open Records.

The attorney general’s office, which represents Wolf, told the seven-judge panel that decades of state court precedent backed its position that the firing was within Wolf’s authority.

The judges raised questions about how the case might affect other positions in state government, and pressed lawyers for Arneson and the Senate Republican caucus about how they can divine the unwritten intent of the 2009 law that established the job and the executive director’s six-year term.

Joel Frank, Arneson’s lawyer, told the judges there were a “multitude of indicators” about the Legislature’s intentions, including the six-year term that would outlast any single gubernatorial term.

Wolf has said Arneson’s appointment, made in the waning days of then-Gov. Tom Corbett’s tenure, was too hasty and lacked transparency. The governor wants a national search for a new executive director.