Greedy Trial Lawyer
A Secrecy Tax For Sealed Court Files
Category: In Your Face
My lips are sealed may be the right promise to make and keep about a client's confidences, but Let's seal the amount of the settlement or the court file rarely is the right thing to do. Once a matter has become a publicly litigated case in our civil justice system the public has a right to know.
I propose a secrecy tax that would be imposed annually upon any litigants who convince a court to seal a file or settlement. The money would fund a public Anti-Court Secrecy Bureau of attorneys whose only mission would be to constantly litigate to unseal what has been sealed.
At the request of the Civil Rules Advisory Committee, researchers at the Federal Judicial Center did an empirical study of settlements that were sealed. Now one of the researchers writes about the project: Robert Timothy Reagan, The Hunt for Sealed Settlement Agreements, 81 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 439-62 (2006).He notes that, even when the settlement is sealed, the public is not necessarily deprived of all information about the case. Often the complaint and docket sheet were not sealed -- so one could find out what the plaintiff's allegations were. Most often, the only information that was sealed was the amount of settlement.
The whole study is Robert Timothy Reagan et al., Sealed Settlement Agreements in Federal District Court (Federal Judicial Center 2004). It includes an appendix summarizing local district court rules on the topic. An earlier report summarizes federal and state rules, as of 2003: Robert Timothy Reagan et al., Sealed Settlement Agreements in Federal District Court -- May 2003 Progress Report.
Excerpted from Trial Ad Notes
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