Professor Eugene Volokh of The Volokh Conspiracy points me at a curious case in which the plaintiff has moved to seal another of his case’s records, meaning they are not public, for no particularly obvious reason:
In 2017, Bonner lost a case in New Jersey state appellate court, Bonner v. Cumberland Reg’l High Sch. Dist. Justia.com, a site that (among other things) publishes online copies of state and federal court opinions, included that nonprecedential New Jersey decision; Bonner then sued in federal court, asking the federal court to order Justia to remove the opinion. Yesterday federal District Judge Peter G. Sheridan granted Justia’s motion to dismiss (Bonner v. Justia, Inc., 2019 WL 3892858):
Plaintiff seems to believe the New Jersey [appellate] opinion is his personal property…. Plaintiff seeks to prevent the [opinion] from being “reported, copied, distributed, shared, or by any other means used by anyone or any website.” “[T]he courts of this country recognize a general right to inspect and copy public records and documents, including judicial records and documents.” …
Plaintiff is proceeding pro se, and the Court should read Plaintiff’s complaint [here, amended] generously and hold it “to less stringent standards than formal pleadings drafted by lawyers.” … [But t]he amended complaint is substantively meritless, as was the original complaint.
Plaintiff is essentially attempting to seal the Appellate Division’s Opinion, which—like federal court documents—[is] open to the public. There is a heightened public interest in disclosure of materials that are filed within the Courts, which outweighs private interests in confidentiality, as the Courts are funded by the public and in general judicial proceedings are not done in secret….
It’s worth noting that public access to judicial records is one of the keys to monitoring for incompetent or unworthy judges, and so simply acceding to his request was not an option. The importance of that monitoring for the health of society is too great. Naturally, there are exceptions.
But it’s also worth remembering that these rules come from the pre-Web era, an era where one had to either visit the Court or know do a bit of work in order to request the records. In this era of online records, the satisfaction of idle curiosity is, sometimes, a little too easy.
In the end, I have no dispute over the judge’s decision. But it does bring up the subject of just how hard it’s become to drop out of society – and whether or not it’s a legitimate interest of society’s members. Most of me says that, yes, it’s legitimate, but there’s a small part of me that wonders.
