Law Commons^™

A Modest Proposal: Recognizing (At Last) That The Federal Rules Do Not Declare That Discovery Is Presumptively Public, Richard L. Marcus

Chicago-Kent Law Review

The adoption of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure worked a revolution in American litigation by introducing broad party-controlled discovery. The framers of those Rules intended broad discovery to facilitate decisions on the merits, and their revolution served as a catalyst for many types of claims in American courts. American discovery also became anathema in the rest of the world, which saw it as too great a cost to pay for better or more accurate litigation results. As American discovery hit full stride in the 1970s, nonparties began to argue that the Federal Rules made all material turned over in …

Court-Ordered Confidentiality In Discovery, Howard M. Erichson

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This Article offers support for the argument that protective orders for discovery confidentiality should be granted upon a relatively light showing of good cause. Part I offers reasons why, in the vast majority of cases, courts should readily grant motions for protective orders with respect to discovery confidentiality as long as the movant can articulate some legitimate need for the information to be kept confidential. Looking at modern United States discovery from a comparative and historical perspective, broad and powerful party-controlled discovery can only be justified as a means of finding information for the resolution of the dispute, not as …

Sealing And Revealing: Rethinking The Rules Governing Public Access To Information Generated Through Litigation, Andrew D. Goldstein

Chicago-Kent Law Review

The current law governing public access to information generated through civil litigation is flawed in two ways: (1) while many states and courts in theory require rigorous standards to be met before court documents, including judicially-approved settlement agreements, can be sealed, in practice courts often allow pressure from private parties to trump public interests; and (2) the public's lack of any ability to access unfiled discovery materials deprives the public of information it often has an interest in seeing and permits litigants to enter into secrecy agreements that hide their bad acts.

This Article details the deficiencies in the existing …

The Hunt For Sealed Settlement Agreements, Robert Timothy Reagan

Chicago-Kent Law Review

When a United States senator asked the federal judiciary to look into sealed settlement agreements, the Civil Rules Advisory Committee asked the Federal Judicial Center to undertake a research effort to discover how often settlement agreements are sealed in federal court and under what circumstances. The Center learned that the sealing of settlement agreements in federal court is rare, and typically the only part of the court record kept secret by the sealing of a settlement agreement is the amount of settlement. This article describes how the Center developed its re- search project to address the senator's concerns. The article …