Some backstory on the underlying lawsuit, from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (Aidan Cox):
The University of New Brunswick has become the target of legal action by a Republican politician in Pennsylvania who's accusing the school of leaking his doctoral thesis and of participating in a scheme to discredit his research on a First World War hero.
Doug Mastriano, a U.S. Army veteran and state senator, is suing UNB and several of its faculty members following a wave of criticism directed at the thesis he wrote on Sgt. Alvin C. York that earned Mastriano a PhD from the university in Fredericton.
"Defendants embarked on a racketeering enterprise to deprive Col. Mastriano of his intangible property interests in his PhD, his books, and his speaking engagements," says the lawsuit, filed in Oklahoma by lawyer Daniel Cox….
The lawsuit says it was filed in that court because James Gregory …, one of the named defendants, lives in that jurisdiction….
But the alleged libel at the heart of Mastriano's libel claim (one of several claims in the case) is sealed, and parts of an online article that is claimed to be the basis for the lawsuit are redacted. I've therefore moved to intervene and unseal those exhibits; longtime readers of the blog may remember my successfully doing something similar in the Northern District of Oklahoma (this case is in the Western District of Oklahoma), in Parson v. Farley. Here are key parts of my motion to unseal, which were written together with Stanford law student Olivia Morello (you can also read our motion to intervene).
