From yesterday's decision by Chief Judge Elizabeth Wolford in U.S. v. Giacobbe (W.D.N.Y.):
Transparency and public access to judicial proceedings are of paramount importance. However, those interests are not without reasonable and narrowly tailored limits. "Judicial documents are subject at common law to a potent and fundamental presumptive right of public access that predates even the U.S. Constitution." …
[As to these papers], the Court finds that the presumption of public access is low. The Second Circuit has explained that the presumption of public access is at its peak where "applied to documents that play a central role in determining litigants' substantive rights— conduct at the heart of Article III." Conversely, "[w]here testimony or documents play only a negligible role in the performance of Article III duties, the weight of the presumption is low and amounts to little more than a prediction of public access absent a countervailing reason."
Here, the submission at issue is unrelated to the Court's resolution of the parties' substantive rights but is instead addressed to the collateral matter of the Court's inherent authority to supervise the conduct of members of its bar. Indeed, the submission was prompted not by any action taken by the parties, but by the Court's sua sponte Order. Under the circumstances, the common law presumption of public access is not strong.
