"Sunshine in Litigation" Bill Introduced Again
Law360 is reporting that Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) is seeking to revive the 2009 "Sunshine in Litigation Act," a bill we covered previously. H.R. 592 would turn around the Supreme Court's Seattle Times Co. v. Rhinehart, 467 U.S. 20, 33 (1984), which concluded that discovery materials are not public components of a civil trial. As a result, litigation protective orders are permissible to protect the confidential and proprietary information of parties to civil litigation, at least until information produced in discovery is filed with the court or introduced into evidence for determination of a merits issue (such as on a motion for summary judgment or at trial. These bills are introduced regularly, even though in 1996 the Federal Judicial Center confirmed there was no basis for the primary justification articulated by proponents of such measures, reporting that its "empirical study showed that the orders did not impact public safety or health. . . . The empirical data showed no evidence that protective orders create any significant problem of concealing information about public hazards."
