More Pressure on For Fee Legal Publishers
October 24, 2018
One of the things we take for granted in the United States is information access. The US Constitution and other laws make it mandatory that certain information is shared with the public for transparency. Other reasons are laws like the Freedom of Information Act that declassifies confidential information when it is no longer a security risk. The Electronic Frontier Foundation shares how the US Court of the Appeals of the Federal Circuit shares its documentation, “Federal Circuit Makes Briefs Immediately Available To The Public.”
The Federal Circuit Court will now make its briefs available to the public. Before briefs were only available after a period of days when they were reviewed by the Clerk’s Office. However, the Clerk’s Office wants to be clear that all received briefs will be marked as “tendered,” until the office has accepted them for filing, then they will be publicly available. The instant access is a victory:
“While this is perhaps a small change, we appreciate that the Federal Circuit is making briefs available upon filing. We had encountered delays of 7 days or more (this meant that the parties’ briefs were sometimes not available until after supporting amicus briefs were due). Ultimately, the public’s right of access to courts includes a right to timely access. The Federal Circuit is the federal court of appeal that hears appeals in patent cases from all across the country, and many of its cases are of interest to the public at large.”
The Federal Circuit’s former access to briefs conflicted with other actions it holds on transparency. The good news is that the Federal Circuit will only seal information if there is good reason and if parties want to have more than fifteen consecutive words sealed they need to file a separate motion. Hopefully more federal district courts will not seal as many records, because the Federal Circuit is not doing so.
Whitney Grace, October 24, 2018
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