As some readers may recall, I've been trying since 2022 to get unsealed a federal case in which all the documents were sealed. The case itself was brought using the parties' names, and the docket sheet itself was publicly available. But the only documents that I could read were an opinion that had been posted to Westlaw before the case was sealed and several opinions that had been apparently erroneously made available on Westlaw while the case was sealed. Those documents revealed that there were some interesting First Amendment questions raised by some of the orders in the case, which is why I wanted to be able to access more information from the record. (Now that the orders are indeed unsealed, I hope to write about them soon.)
My UCLA student Nora Browning and I eventually argued the matter in the Fifth Circuit, and the Fifth Circuit agreed in Sealed Appellant v. Sealed Appellee that the case should largely be unsealed, though with redactions of personal information (to which I didn't object).
The Fifth Circuit also instructed the District Court to consider whether the case should be retroactively pseudonymized, on the grounds that plaintiff had been suing in part over alleged revenge porn, and possibly that there was other highly personal information about the plaintiff in the record. I am not sure that the law authorizes retroactive pseudonymization, but I chose not to object to such pseudonymization in this particular case: I just wanted access to the court records, and I sympathized in some measure with the plaintiff, who likely would have been allowed to proceed under a pseudonym in the first place had this been requested at the outset instead of total sealing.
