Law Commons^™

Public Health Versus Court-Sponsored Secrecy, Daniel J. Givelber, Anthony Robbins

Law and Contemporary Problems

Public health practice relies on access to information. Givelber and Robbins discuss the debate about "court-sponsored" secrecy: Whether or not courts should tolerate, edorse, or protect secrecy when the sequestered information might help protect the public health.

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 …

The Arkansas Proposal On Access To Court Records: Upgrading The Common Law With Electronic Freedom Of Information Norms, Richard J. Peltz-Steele, Joi L. Leonard, Amanda J. Andrews

Faculty Publications

The law and practice of court record access across United States jurisdictions is in a confused state. Public access to records in the hands of government, including court records, is a desirable norm of public policy; on this point, there is universal agreement. But there is disagreement on questions as fundamental as whether public access to court records is founded in constitutional law, or only in common law; and the extent to which court record access is the province of the courts or the legislature. And most importantly, there is widely divergent disagreement about what circumstances warrant restriction on public …

Using Court Records For Research, Teaching, And Policymaking: The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, Margo Schlanger, Denise Lieberman

Articles

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is, wisely, planning the future of its enormous collection of relatively recent court records. The pertinent regulation, a “records disposition schedule” first issued in 1995 by the Judicial Conference of the United States in consultation with NARA, commits the Archives to keeping, permanently, all case files dated 1969 or earlier; all case files dated 1970 or later in which a trial was held, and “any civil case file which NARA has determined in consultation with court officials to have historical value.” Other files may be destroyed 20 years after they enter the federal …