Courts should hold the line on sealing cases, panel says

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By Peter Vieth
Dolan Newswires

RICHMOND, VA — Civil cases in the federal courts should be locked away from public view only for “extraordinary circumstances” unless required by statute, the courts’ policy-making board has decided.

“As public courts we ought to be very careful about sealing anything,” said Abingdon U.S. District Judge James P. Jones, one of the 26 members of the U.S. Judicial Conference.

The panel last week adopted a national policy urging judges to strictly limit the practice of sealing entire cases from the public. The vote was unanimous, Chief Judge David Sentelle of the federal appeals court in Washington told the Associated Press.

The sealing of an entire civil case is already a rare event. A 2006 study found 576 out of 245,326 cases were sealed. Many of those cases involved whistleblower actions under the federal False Claims Act.

That law mandates secrecy at the inception of a case to allow the government time to investigate and consider whether to intervene.

Other than FCA cases, “I don’t remember ever sealing a civil file,” Jones said. He said the issue might come up when all parties to a case ask for privacy to protect personal information.

That may happen more often in other states. Jones said the federal courts have differing standards on sealing cases. There is “not a lot of uniformity” in the practice, he said.

The conference encouraged judges to consider alternatives to keeping an entire case under wraps, including sealing only certain documents, redacting information from public files, and lifting seals when the need for secrecy has ended.