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Friday, July 29, 2011
Courts - "All too often courts permit parties to file entire briefs under seal when there is only a kernel of confidential information."
That is a quote from this article -- "Not So Confidential: A Call for Restraint in Sealing Court Records" by Bernard Chao of the blog, Paterntly-O. (Thanks to How Appealing for the link.) The concern is federal district courts. Choa writes:
Because of the problems I encountered in researching the Qualcomm v. Broadcomm case and others like it, I decided to conduct a small unscientific survey to determine if there was a systemic problem of filing too much material under seal. With the help of a research assistant, I identified cases where a party sought to file sensitive material under seal. I only searched for cases in districts with heavy patent loads. 25 The districts were the Central District of California, the Northern District of California, the Eastern District of Texas, the District of Delaware, the District of New Jersey, the Southern District of New York and the Northern District of Illinois. I identified three cases in each district where parties sought to file material under seal. I then simply looked at what material was filed under seal and searched for a public version of the same document.Indiana federal courts were not included in the review ...The results were not good for those who care about open access to court records. When there was confidential material to be filed under seal in the Central District of California2, the Northern District of California, the Eastern District of Texas, the District of Delaware and the District of New Jersey, the entire brief was filed under seal and there was no public version. In other words, in five of the busiest patent courts in the country, when confidential material was filed under seal, other material that had no claim of confidentiality was also made unavailable. There were more heartening results from the Southern District of New York and the Northern District of Illinois. In these two courts, parties that sought to file confidential material under seal also filed a public version of the same material. Thus, the public had access to the basic legal arguments being advanced.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on July 29, 2011 03:21 PM
Posted to Courts in general