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Full-Text Articles in Law
Uncovering, Disclosing, And Discovering How The Public Dimensions Of Court-Based Processes Are At Risk, Judith Resnik
Uncovering, Disclosing, And Discovering How The Public Dimensions Of Court-Based Processes Are At Risk, Judith Resnik
Chicago-Kent Law Review
In this essay—considering "privacy" and "secrecy" in courts—I first offer a brief history of the public performance, through adjudication, of the power of rulers, who relied on open rituals of judgment and punishment to make and maintain law and order. Second, I turn to consider why, during the twentieth century, the federal courts became an unusually good source of information about legal, political, and social conflict. Third, I map how, despite new information technologies, knowledge about conflicts and their resolution is being limited by the devolution of court authority to agencies, by the outsourcing of decisions to private providers, and …
Secrecy In Context: The Shadowy Life Of Civil Rights Litigation, Minna J. Kotkin
Secrecy In Context: The Shadowy Life Of Civil Rights Litigation, Minna J. Kotkin
Chicago-Kent Law Review
This article explores how secrecy has come to pervade employment discrimination litigation as a consequence of procedural and substantive changes in the law over the last twenty-five years. In contrast to products liability and toxic tort claims, where secrecy can endanger the public health and safety, secrecy in the discrimination context has a less dramatic impact and thus, has attracted little attention. But when very few discrimination claims end in a public finding of liability, there is a significant cumulative effect, creating the appearance that workplace bias is largely a thing of the past. The trend towards secrecy can be …
Court-Ordered Confidentiality In Discovery, Howard M. Erichson
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
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
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 …